Two cash machines saying the same thing in different ways:
[Top up as a verb]
[Top up as a noun]
This is what language in use is all about - having multiple ways of saying what you want to express.
- Can you lend me your pen?
- Can I borrow your pen?
- Not last night but the night before
- The night before last
- Two nights ago
- He’s not
- He isn’t
- Add insult to injury
- Rub salt into the wounds
- Spelled
- Spelt
- Likes to dress up as a woman
- Likes dressing up as a woman
- How are you? Not bad
- How are you doing? Can’t complain
- Cross your arms
- Fold your arms
Choice is generally regarded as a good thing. Cable TV companies have been using the word for years now in an attempt to persuade us to give them our money.
But for language learners, choice can be a bad thing. In Spanish, there are at least two words for clumsey: torpe and patoso. I remember when I learned this I was disappointed. I felt that this doubled my workload - I had to learn two words for the price of one.
When faced with choice, there are two common learner questions that will arise. The first is a very familiar one that language teachers have to deal with every day:
What is the difference between …?
Providing students with concise explanations about the difference between words (to shake/to tremble, tight/mean, ghost/fantom, etc) can be very demanding. It is certainly a skill for teachers to acquire. But sometimes, for a quicker and simpler answer, it can be beneficial to consider the second question:
Which is more common?
For this information, we can turn to word lists. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Wordcount - an online graphic representation of the 86,800 most frequent words in English. For individual words, this can be a very effective tool for learners who want to decide which synonym of a pair they want to make their own.
For phrases and collocations, Google is a fantastic tool. For example, the results of a Google search tell me that ‘top up’ might be more common as a verb:
- “to top up” → 953,000 Google hits
- “a top up” → 377,000 Google hits
I wrote an article on this a while back (link here). (NB In the article, I mention a site called Google fight. Avoid this site as the results it gives can be incredibly inaccurate. It is much better to use plain old Google)
This week’s lesson on teflclips uses a short film of a cash withdrawal from an ATM to teach students some basic banking vocabulary.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Dmitri Remizov // Jan 22, 2009 at 2:36 am
I think that students should know all the words. Even if they don’t use them in their everyday speech. Of course when we speak we have this power of choise: we don’t use a word if we are not sure about its meaning. But what about reading or listening to someone speaking? In this situation we don’t have a choice. We have to understand what’s been said or written.
So my point is when a teacher explains a new word or expression s/he should at first present the most common word or expression and then s/he has to give the synonyms.
Moreover I think that the exercises should vary. In case of the most common word/expression teacher should make sure that the students know the word/expression. So the exercises should be more complex and their performance should take more time. And as for the synomyms you can use the exercises where a plain recognition is enough. I mean it’s like in our native language: we know much more words than we use in our everyday life and there are words/expressions which look/sound familiar to us but we are not sure about the situations when they are more appropriate. But even with the lack of knowledge on the details we can still understand the whole meaning of a phrase. So when teaching a second language we should stick to the same model, I think.
2 admin // Jan 22, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Hello Dmitri
Good to hear from you. Thanks for your comment.
The idea here applies to the decisions that learners make regarding the words/items that they want to be able to produce themselves when speaking or writing. When I became aware of the 2 words in Spanish for ‘clumsy’ (’patoso’ and ‘torpe’) for example, I didn’t want to commit both to memory. That would have been inefficient. My memory isn’t very good and there were so many new words to learn. So I decided to memorise torpe and not to worry about patoso for that moment.
What interests me here is how we can give students of English the means to answer their own ‘Which is more common?’ question and perhaps shift attention from the teacher as a walking talking dictionary.
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