Today we talked about teaching vocabulary and taking into account different features or properties of words when we teach.

Traditionally we focus on the denotation of words and we clarify denotation as students encounter the words. Many times vocabulary words are associated to the topic of the lesson that we are teaching and so we teach the vocabulary as it is used and presented in the lesson, without considering the extended features the words might have.

When we said extended features in class, we were refering to connotation, collocation, and semantic differences with related words.

We also discussed how exploring these features is a task that students needed to carry out independently more and more as they progress in their english studies. In addition to setting asside time for the exploration in class, students need to make this exploration a strategy in their language learning.

This reminded me of the experimenting I have been doing with Google language tools. Showing students how they can use Google language tools could encourage them to take on the task of exploring words and their extended features.

I will briefly describe Google language tools that may be helpful for students:

Define:

When using this operator in google search, Google will give back the definition of the word from different sources on the web. It also gives related frases, so you can explore the common pairings for this word. It works with single words, and phrases, and even many idioms. Ex: [define:stroll] [define:from the heart]

*:

We can use this operator to explore collocation. The axterix is a wild card in google and it means blank. If you type a word followed or precided by "*" you will get phrases that include the word and what is more commonly found next to it, either before or after. The use of this operator to determine collocation is limited because the corpus is not necesarilly limited to natural english. The corpus is all the web pages that google indexes.

" ":

We use the dobble quote to search for an exact phrase. We can use this to explore which is the most comon form of a phrase by searching for different variations and looking at how many results are found. For example: "alongside my friends" - 3,480 results; "along with my friends" - 2,380,000 results.

Google Image Search:

Google image search can be used as a visual dictionary. It works very well with concrete content words and it gives students a chance to learn vocabulary and clarify meaning without translation.

Google Translate Tools:

Finally, Google offers translation tools that are very acurate. The most interesting feature is that users can contribute better translations and so build up the translation database.

In conclusion, it would be helpful to plan a lesson with students in which you show them and help them use these tools so that they can clarify and explore vocabulary on their own.