PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC RELATIONS

Well, I apologized to my followers but I was kind of busy at work! 

Anyway today at work, I was  using a common game that is used in spanish and it is called El Baúl de Mi Abuela, I named it in English "My Grandma's Box". 

This game is for learning and remembering vocabulary, the idea is that the Teacher has to say in  "My Grandma's Box" there is a Lion for example then teacher points at their students at random and they have two options which depend on the teacher instruction, the first one is to say words which start with the same letter in this case "L" such as: love, lamp, last, late, like, lord, lemon, little, etc; and the second option that is two say words which corresponds to same family words for example Lion is an animal so students would have to say animals as well, such as: dog, snake, pig, cat, cow, etc. 

This is a great game, and today my students were having fun when they were playing, and while they were playing I started thinking about the reading of Hedge, T (2009) about Vocabulary, and I remember the PARADIGMATIC AND SYNTAGMATIC  relations that he mentioned in this chapter, and I realized that students were able to use the meaning of the vocabulary according to these two realtions in a unconscious way. It was surprising for me because, students were using their mental lexicon in English using these relations among words to play and get points in this simple but useful game.  Every time I feel more and more amaze for our capacity of having and developing our MENTAL LEXICON

Finally, I let you know this game, if you want you can use it in your classes, chikdren will have fun and they will practice vocabulary at the same time.