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PREVIEW OF PRESENTATION FOR MICELT 2018 WORKSHOP ON VOCABULARY TEACHING AND LEARNING

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Preview of Paper on Vocabulary Teaching for MICELT 2018 Conference

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Wikipedia and Wiktionary as LL Resources

One possible resource for students' word study and language practice is Wikipedia and its related Wiktionary. However, the situation at Wikipedia is complicated. Beginning-level students (and their teachers) might have difficulty in navigating its text-heavy pages and multiple hyperlinks. There are actually at least four different resources at Wikipedia that might be useful. But the teacher will have to take great pains to make sure the students find and understand them.  First, Wikipedia has various bilingual dictionaries that can be accessed from the top page of the Wiktionary site. For example, one can link to a Japanese Wiktionary (JW). The JW can be used as both E-J and J-J dictionaries. The J-J function can also serves as a minimal J-E one, since it will give a very short English translation for a searched Japanese word.  Below in the figure is a screenshot of the result of using the JW's E-J function for the verb 'negotiate'. It includes an etymology, phoneti...

Some problem consonants and consonant contrasts of English

We can identify 'problem sounds' by three main ways:  (1) differences across English and the L1 of the learners (contrastive analysis), (2) the actual pronunciation errors L2 learners produce (in general or based on language background), and (3) 'marked' sounds of spoken English that learners of various backgrounds might find difficult (for example, they are late in native acquisition processes, or they are rare sounds among most world languages or at least some major languages).  Here is a set of problem consonant sounds and contrasts that I have compiled with all three above in mind.