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The Verbs
The verbs are supplemental
sheets for other units. The purpose of these sheets is to give students a
greater vocabulary base to communicate. As a teacher, I was often
confronted with the same boring answers to every question I asked:
"What did you do
yesterday?"
"I watched TV."
And so I developed several sets
of flashcards to
increase my students?vocabulary rapidly. The more they could say, the
more they would say and the faster we could progress. However, being influenced
by the lexical approach in ESL, I insisted on criteria for teaching vocabulary:
Vocabulary must be taught in context with collocates to allow for automaticity
at later stages. In the case of verbs, vocabulary should almost always be
taught with commonly occurring direct and indirect objects as well as with
prepositions that are found in phrasal verbs. That is, vocabulary should
be taught in 'pre-assembled chunks.'
When I teach 'take', I think
it's appropriate to teach the things that collocate well with take,
for example 'take a bus' or 'take a shower.' Or in the case of phrasal verbs,
'look' is not to be separated from 'look at' or 'look for'.
Of all my resource projects, I think the cards and verbs are the most useful for kids. And I look forward to the day when I can create Gorillas II, II, IV.