CALL Lesson Plan

Randy Rebman

Assumptions: This lesson plan should be viewed as a continuation of vocabulary learning activities that correspond with words students will encounter in their reading. The words have been selected because they are from the Academic Word List. Students have been exposed to the use of concordance lines prior to this lesson. This lesson should also be seen as a way to scaffold students use of paper-based corpus materials. Later, after students have become accustomed to using these materials, they can slowly be introduced to working with corpus tools on their own.

Lesson Plan
Procedure Building/Activating Background Knowledge o Ask students how they normally learn vocabulary when they do not have a dictionary nearby? How can they understand the meaning of vocabulary words when they are reading? Write the following sentence on the board: It has been a rough time for the new students who have just began taking difficult classes. Ask students what can guess about the meaning of this word? Elicit a few ideas. Then write the following sentence on the board: It is dangerous to swim in the rough water. Ask students what we can notice about the other words that around this word rough. Do we think rough is a happy kind of word? What part of speech is it? What other adjectives are used in the same sentence that might give you some clues?

So when we look at these example sentences, we can begin to get an idea of what the word means. We can also see that words are sometimes married to other words. This means they like to be with other words in sentences. The fancy word for this is a collocation. In the example sentences, what are the two words that come right after rough. Yes, water and time are collocations for rough. Today we are going to look at a number of example sentences to help us understand the meaning of important vocabulary words for our reading.

Presentation of New Information o o Project the worksheet and give a copy to students. Model the process of filling out each part (A, B, C, D) using a padcam or projector . Guide students through how they can guess the meanings using the concordance lines.

CALL Lesson Plan Practice o o Split students up into partners so that they can work on this activity together.

Randy Rebman

Set a timer for 10 minutes. Assign each group a different part to begin with (one group will take Part A, another part B and so on). Go around the room and check on students progress on different parts of the activity.

o Apply o

When time is up have one student from each group rotate to another group. Direct the students to share what they found and wrote for each part to help their new partner complete the next part of the exercise.

Comprehension check o Collect as homework or come back as a class and have students report on some of the collocations that they have learned.