Chapter 4 – Hedge

Question 2: Review a set of three or four coursebooks used with different

levels of learner in your institution. List the different types of procedure
used for teaching vocabulary.

New English File Intermediate – Oxford University Press - p.146

• In exercise number 1, the procedure used to present new vocabulary

is to provide the definitions of the new words which students have to
match to the adjectives. This seems to be a difficult task but students are
able to do it easily due to the number of words of latin origin. Of course,
there has to be further practice in which learners can use them.

• In point number 2, students have to match words and their antonyms.

In this case, the procedure used to teach vocabulary is focusing on
paradigmatic relations between words.

• In exercise 3 there is a list of other personality adjectives. Students

categorise them according to their prefixes. Here, they resort to their
own learning skills to see which adjective goes with a prefix. To do this,
they might compare with other words with similar spelling, they can
focus on Spanish to see if the word has a similar prefix or they might just
feel that one word has a specific prefix because they have heard it before
or because it sounds right. This is because learners build networks of
meaning in their minds to learn things.
 Challenges 3 – Pearson Longman – pp. 8, 9

• In this book, students have a lot of training in lexical inferencing.

They are given reading comprehension exercises in which they can
discover the meanings of new words through context. This is said to be a
way of retaining new vocabulary because as there is problem-solving
words can be learnt and remembered more easily.

In this case, there are some phrasal verbs in the text so learners have to
guess their meaning and later use them to paraphrase some sentences.
As they are learning phrasal verbs they do not pay attention to the
category of the word because they already know these are verbs, but
they have to resort to the context to get the meaning. In other exercises
where they have to guess different words it is very important for students
to focus on the syntactic categories.
New English File Beginner – Oxford University Press - p.29

• In this book, which is for elementary students, learners are also

given a reading comprehension exercise, in which they have to guess the
meaning of the highlighted words. However, in this case, the checking of
the new vocabulary is suggested in the instructions. It says it can be
done by the teacher or a dictionary. Students can use a monolingual
dictionary at this stage to look up for words like `meeting´ or `world´,
which they can find difficult. The rest of the vocabulary can be inferred
by the context and origin of the word.