Научная статья на тему 'Helping higher-level students with learning adjectives and their collocations'

Helping higher-level students with learning adjectives and their collocations Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

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Ключевые слова
CHUNK / COLLOCATION / CONCORDANCE / CORPORA / DESCRIPTIVE ADJECTIVE / DICTIONARY

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Petrenko Sergey Vladimirovich

The article deals with teaching adjectives and their collocations to higher level learners as well as problems they can face. The techniques that can help learners remember adjectives taking into account their collocations and chunks have been analysed. The students are encouraged to use English-English dictionaries and electronic corpora.

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Текст научной работы на тему «Helping higher-level students with learning adjectives and their collocations»

22. Фирсов В.В. Дифференциация обучения на основе обязательных результатов обучения. М., 1994.

23. Шадриков В.Д. Личностно ориентированное обучение // Педагогика, 1994. № 5.

24. Якиманская И.С. Технология личностно ориентированного обучения в современной школе. М.: Сентябрь, 2000.

HELPING HIGHER-LEVEL STUDENTS WITH LEARNING ADJECTIVES AND THEIR COLLOCATIONS Petrenko S.V.

Petrenko Sergey Vladimirovich - Candidate of Philological Sciences, INSTITUTE OF PHILOLOGY TARAS SHEVCHENKO NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF KIEV, KIEV, UKRAINE

Abstract: the article deals with teaching adjectives and their collocations to higher level learners as well as problems they can face. The techniques that can help learners remember adjectives taking into account their collocations and chunks have been analysed. The students are encouraged to use English-English dictionaries and electronic corpora. Keywords: chunk, collocation, concordance, corpora, descriptive adjective, dictionary.

Introduction

Students tend to prioritize certain parts of speech while importance of others may be diminished. Teachers should encourage their learners to pay more attention to adjectives as they not only describe nouns, but also attribute, modify and specify them. Synonyms of descriptive adjectives and their collocations with nouns can extend the vocabulary of students and help them freely communicate with TL speakers.

However, a limited number of scientific works deal with the problem of teaching adjectives. Authors such as Bloomfield (2005), Lewis (1993, 2008), McCarten (2007) and Thornbury (2002, 2004) have introduced and analyzed general teaching vocabulary strategies. Collocations, which were the analyzing object of Gairns and Redman (1998), Lewis (2000), McCarten (2007), and Willis (2003), can help understand how we can apply those teaching strategies to our students' needs.

Resources for Lexis and Teaching Strategies

Dictionaries and language corpora are considered to be important resources to explore lexical items and their collocations. Traditional paper dictionaries provide definitions, descriptions of word meaning. Students tend to use dictionaries to find the answer to the question What does this word mean? However, the weakness is that most dictionaries do not give attention to collocations and context. Michael Lewis states that a good English-English dictionary gives expressions or even sentences focusing on the word usage, and they might include a couple of useful collocations of the word. Therefore, the teacher should boost students to search these examples for collocations [7, p. 36].

Electronic dictionaries nowadays provide students with plenty of collocations. The convenience of such dictionaries is that they have quick and powerful search engines. Michael Lewis suggests training students to use searching tools of such dictionaries efficiently [7, p. 38]. Collocation dictionaries can be a helpful resource for students when they write essays or articles. Together with paper dictionaries they help give the context.

Corpora and concordances have increased their popularity with the development of the Internet. Concordances provide abundant resources comparing to dictionaries. A concordancer, which is a piece of computer software, can search large amounts of texts for example of using a certain word or phrase.

Techniques for teaching lexis. Scott Thombury describes the following techniques for teaching vocabulary:

- using mnemonics, when devising an image connecting to the pronunciation of the TL word with the meaning of a L1 word;

- using word cards followed by the peer teaching and testing, association games, guess my word, de-vowelled words, ghost writing activities;

- guessing from the context;

- using dictionaries;

- keeping records, which means that students should be encouraged to have a particular notebook solely for vocabulary, as they have to depend on their own vocabulary records [13, pp. 144-161].

As for vocabulary notebooks, James McCrostie has concluded that most students (including those of intermediate level) have difficulty choosing words on their own. They tend to over-represent some parts of speech and neglect others [10].

V.P. Takac has analyzed the following vocabulary learning strategies: repeating new words aloud when studying or repeating them mentally; writing down words repeatedly to remember them; testing oneself; regular reviewing outside classroom; making word lists; translating words into L1; taking notes when watching films and TV programs, reading for pleasure; grouping words together; connecting words to physical objects; associating words in the context, with already known words; using the words in sentences; using synonyms in conversations; listening to songs in TL, etc. [12]. However, these strategies can be viewed mostly as students' personal strategies of learning new lexical items.

On the other hand, Jim Scrivener suggests incorporating the following lesson procedures in addition to those mentioned in the coursebooks:

- pre-teach lexical units, when the teacher uses pictures or draws on the board followed by eliciting and clarifying unknown items;

- written vocabulary practice, when e.g. students get handouts showing pictures or photos and a list of lexical units which they have to match by drawing lines;

- speaking vocabulary practice, when students work in pairs describing a situation and using the introduced lexical units;

- reading for specific information, when students try to find the answers to questions very quickly;

- further vocabulary work, when they focus on useful lexical units; and

- communicative activity, when they role play in small groups [11, pp. 197-198].

For my lexis lesson I have chosen the guessing from the context strategy for introducing new lexical items. Students will be encouraged to read the text, and fill the new words in the blanks of this text. They should guess the meaning from the context, i.e. the sentences surrounding the noun+adjective phrase that the students are supposed to paste. The texts for reading were taken and adapted from an American art magazine.

Adjective as a Part of Speech

As the main function of language is to convey meaning from the addresser to the addressee, the words, where the basic concepts are encoded, are connected with the grammar. R.M.W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald explain that nouns, verbs and adjectives can be differentiated according to the syntactic criterion, e.g. a noun can immediately follow an article and is not necessary to be followed by any other lexical unit (as an adjective); there are no morphological criteria applying for all nouns, e.g. some nouns can take plural marking [4, p. 2].

The adjective is viewed by scholars as a word which tells the qualities of a person, thing or event [14, p. iii]. Adjectives relate to 'qualities' or 'attributes' of the 'things' [15, p. 7]. Adjectives resemble verbs semantically as they both are semantic predicates and take semantic names. However, they differ syntactically. In English nouns and adjectives can attribute other nouns, be so called 'modifiers' [1].

According to Leonard Bloomfield, the adjectives are classified into two types, descriptive and limiting. The limiting adjective precedes the descriptive adjective with the noun. It defines the noun, but does not describe it [2, p.202]. For instance, in the noun phrase this big house, the limiting adjective this modifies and precedes the descriptive adjective big and the noun house. The majority of adjectives in English are descriptive.

Collocations

Michael Lewis suggests that the maximum communicative power to learners can be given by the lexical approach [8]. Mostly lexical errors, not grammatical, can lead to misunderstanding. The grammar rules can be easily recollected while it is too difficult to remember lexical units. The chunks, which include collocations, idioms, polywords, sentences with pragmatic meaning, should be considered to be the centre in teaching language. Corpuses of the English language (like the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and corpus-based dictionaries provide the 'meaning in use', collocations (environment) and frequency of a certain chunk. Paul Davis and Hanna Kryszewska differentiate between the following types of chunks:

- according to form: single words; word partnerships, which are collocations; colligation, when a collocation has a grammar element and gives a certain meaning; fixed expressions; and routines;

- according to use: priming, which is the process when a particular chunk has a particular meaning and is faced repeatedly; twisted clichés, which are fixed and have an idiomatic meaning; pragmatic bonding rituals, which are age-, gender-, culture-related clichés; and language play [3].

As for the coursebooks, they tend to avoid chunks. However, from my own experience in teaching, Straightforward books are partially successful in their attempt to introduce chunks as they define chunks chaotically.

The way in which two or more words are typically used together is called collocation [9, p. 5]. Michael Lewis insists that collocations are not ideas or concepts, they are words that co-occur, combinations of words that appear naturally and frequently [6, p. 25].

The common types of collocations are as follows:

- adjective + noun

e.g. typical stereotype, public transport

- subject noun + verb

e.g. The audience applauded.

- verb + object noun

e.g. He halted the performance.

- adverb + past participle

e.g. a newly formed department, a highly valued worker.

Collocation can give a useful scheme to revise partially known lexical units. Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman have noted that intermediate level students often use the adjectives light, weak, strong, heavy, mild inaccurately. As an example, the collocation light coffee is used instead of weak or mild coffee [5, p. 39]. Thus, the teacher should find out the types of collocation with which students struggle most. Firstly, L1 interference should be analyzed. Secondly, the teacher should choose restricted collocations for the average learner of the intermediate level. And finally, the best idea is to limit the examples to those which will be the most beneficial to students. Jeanne McCarten suggests that students of higher levels should be encouraged to write down collocations and single words [9, p. 6]. The teacher, in particular, can create the table with columns and students are encouraged to think of words and expressions going with given nouns, adjectives or verbs. Dave Willis suggests providing useful examples of collocations and encouraging students to think about the importance of collocation in their L1 [16, p. 46].

Michael Lewis believes that, firstly, students need some time to identify the basic grammar categories of noun, verb, adjective and adverb, because they are the centre of context search strategies for collocation. Sentence analysis can help here. Secondly, the

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importance of the noun should be emphasized, as we tend to create information around the nouns. The students should be encouraged to practice search strategies, as follows:

- isolating key nouns in the text;

- searching collocations with verbs;

- searching collocations with adjectives;

- searching collocations with adverbs [7, p. 35].

When I prepared the lexis lesson, I analyzed the following adjectives: clumsy, grotesque, mundane, priceless, shallow, vibrant, worthless. They are all descriptive, thus they can be used to describe a piece of art or style. I took collocations of these adjectives with nouns in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, as there they are considered to be more frequent and up-to-date (comparing to dictionaries). The adjective vibrant collocates with the following nouns: colour, community, economy, city, culture, market, green, scene, neighbourhood, society, democracy, voice; mundane collocates with: life, task, matter, activity, detail, reality, object, aspect, existence, routine, chore, subject; grotesque collocates with: face, figure, form, image, parody, body, mask, creature, character, shadow, detail, manner; clumsy collocates with: attempt, hand, finger, foot, boot, step, movement, shoe, leg, handling, suit; shallow collocates with: water, dish, bowl, pool, lake, grave, baking, breathing, end, breath, area; priceless collocates with: treasure, gift, artefact, collection, piece, art, painting, object, resource, experience, museum, antique; worthless collocates with: stock, money, piece, option, currency, paper, share, property, junk, check. I designed the task with filling in the blanks separately nouns and adjectives. Students might guess intuitively which adjectives and nouns can be used together. The following strategies have been used here: noticing common collocations the students can meet in the text, and selecting the collocations which are vital to their particular needs.

Michael Lewis has proposed the following techniques of teaching collocations: synonymy, paraphrase and contextualization. Students' attention should be directed to the surrounding context. After completing, for example, the reading text, the teacher can add a supplementary exercise aimed at activating the collocation given in this text [7, p. 31]. Conclusion

Teaching descriptive adjectives should be combined with the surrounding context and/or situation. It can be a reading, listening or video text. Collocations can help remember adjectives. Teachers as well as their students are encouraged to use English-English dictionaries (paper or electronic) together with collocation dictionaries and/or electronic corpora (which saves time) to prepare the tasks, find right and correct collocation for learning and/or writing articles and essays as well as preparing for freer speaking activities.

References

1. Beck David, 2002. The Typology of Parts of Speech Systems: The Markedness of Adjectives. NY & London. Routledge. 219 p.

2. Bloomfield Leonard, 2005. Language, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited. 567 p.

3. Davis Paul and Kryszewska Hanna, 2012. The Company Words Keep: Lexical chunks in language teaching, Illinois. DELTA Teacher Development Series. 119 p.

4. Dixon R.M.W. andAikhenvaldAlexandra Y. (eds.), 2004. Adjective Classes: A Cross-linguistic Typology, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 370 p.

5. Gairns Ruth and Redman Stuart, 1998. Working with Words: A guide to teaching and learning vocabulary, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 200 p.

6. Lewis Michael, 2008. Implementing the Lexical Approach: Putting Theory into Practice, Heinle, Cengage Learning.

7. Lewis Michael (ed.), 2000. Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach, London, Language Teaching Publications. 245 p.

8. Lewis Michael, 1993. The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward, London, Language Teaching Publications. 200 p.

9. McCarten Jeanne, 2007. Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 30 p.

10. McCrostie James, 2007. Examining Learner Vocabulary Notebooks, Oxford ELT Journal 61 July 2007, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pp. 246-255.

11. Scrivener Jim, 2011. Learning Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching. Third Edition, Oxford, Macmillan Education. 416 p.

12. Takac V.P., 2008. Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Foreign Language Acquisition, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters LTD. 197 p.

13. Thornbury Scott, 2002. How to Teach Vocabulary, Harlow, Pearson Education Limited. 185 p.

14. Thornbury Scott, 2004. Natural Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 220 p.

15. Tucker Gordon H., 1998. The Lexicogrammar of Adjectives: A Systemic Functional Approah to Lexis, NY & London, Cassell. 244 p.

16. Willis Dave, 2003. Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 238 p.

МАСТЕР-КЛАСС ЖИВОПИСИ ОТ МАСТЕРОВ

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Абдусаломходжаев Н.Н. , Абдирасилов С.Ф. , Акбархужаев А.А.

1АбдусаломходжаевНозим Низомхужаевич - и.о. доцента;

2Абдирасилов Сунатулла Файзуллаевич - кандидат педагогических наук, доцент, кафедра изобразительного искусства и методики его преподавания, Ташкентский государственный педагогический университет им. Низами;

3Акбархужаев Абдулазиз Ахмадходжаевич - доцент, кафедра миниатюры и книжной графики, Национальный институт художеств и дизайна им. К. Бекзада, г. Ташкент, Республика Узбекистан

Аннотация: в статье дается информация о мастер-классе, проведенном народным художником СССР членом-корреспондентом Академии Художеств СССР профессором Рахимом Ахмедовым во время пленэрной практики со студентами художественного университета.

Ключевые слова: мастер-класс, изобразительное искусство, натура, колорит.

В залах Государственного музея искусств Узбекистана находятся полотна многих мастеров мирового и отечественного искусства, среди них имеется картина, которая относится к кисти мастера узбекской живописи Рахима Ахмедова и она называется «Материнское раздумье», написанная в 1956 году.

Искусство в процессе мастер-класса занятия маслом дает профессиональные знания в полном объеме, но за значительно более короткий срок, чем это позволяет сделать академическая занятие живописью. С первого же занятия мастер-класса вы включаетесь в творческий процесс. Написав первую же работу, вы начинаете получать знания в области живописи. Вы обучаетесь видеть форму и цветовые отношения, изучаете законы линейной и воздушной перспективы, композиции, разнообразные техники живописи, получаете знания в области истории искусств и анатомии. И с каждой работой все больше проявляется ваша творческая индивидуальность. Уроки живописи под руководством опытных педагогов помогут вам почувствовать вдохновение, присущие настоящему творческому процессу.

Мастер-класс маслом — одна из самых пластичных техник живописи, позволяющая вносить исправления на любом этапе работы, дающая возможность

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