This week, we’re looking at how one of our online professional development courses can help you teach vocabulary and pronunciation. This ties in with one of the principles for teachers’ professional development: S for Sustained.
INSPIRE: the principles supporting your professional development
The word INSPIRE explains our teacher development principles.
The ‘S’ in INSPIRE = Sustained. This means that your institution’s professional development plans take a long-term approach (including online courses for their teachers as part of that longer-term programme). This long-term view should help to ensure real change takes place in teaching and learning.
Advice on presenting new vocabulary:
Below are ways you can think about presenting new vocabulary, taken from our Teaching Vocabulary and Pronunciation online course.
- Choose a set of vocabulary that you would like to teach your class. Don’t be too ambitious and try to do too much in one lesson.
- Think about how you can explain the meanings of the words you want to teach.
- Think about eliciting the words – try to put the meaning before the form.
- Try to avoid saying What does x mean? Start with the meaning of a word or phrase, and see if learners can give you the word – they may already know it.
- Check that the learners have understood the meaning of the new word, either by asking checking questions or by asking them to give an example using that word.
Following the lesson, reflect on the success of your new vocabulary presentation, by asking yourself questions:
- Did my lesson go as planned?
- Did I teach the right amount of vocabulary?
- Did my learners understand the meaning of the new vocabulary?
- Did I check that the learners had understood the meaning?
- By the end of the lesson, did learners know how to say and how to write the word?
How do I study the Teaching Vocabulary and Pronunciation online course?
There are three steps to studying one of our online professional development courses:
- Step 1: either purchase an online course yourself from our online store, or your institution can give you a course activation code.
- Step 2: Register for the Cambridge Learning Management System (the Cambridge LMS) to study our teacher professional development courses online.
You can find a list of online courses and full instructions on how to register, on our website.
- Step 3: Once you’ve registered and logged in, you can either join an online ‘class’ or select ‘self-study’ mode.
For the Teaching Vocabulary and Pronunciation online course: if you decide that self-study mode is the right option for you:
- On the My Learning screen, simply select the Self-study tab
- Select Content next to Teaching Vocabulary and Pronunciation Self-study.
Next week
We’ll look at Teaching Primary Learners Communicatively, which is related to the ‘P for Peer-Collaborative’ principle in INSPIRE.