QUOTES

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” 
― Frantz Fanon


“Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law” 
― de Saussure, Ferdinand

"The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no function at all but to express or stimulate emotion, or both. And an examination of them soon convinces us that in them we see language at its least linguistic. We have come to the frontier between language and inarticulate vocal sounds. And at that frontier we find a two-way traffic going on.” 
― C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

VOCABULARY CARDS AND GAMES!

CHECK IT OUT!

PASS THE BAG GAME

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSsnIhk0Y_I

VOCABULARY CARDS 
You can find many more in this adress: http://www.eslflashcards.com/preview.php?id=10

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. 

MENTAL LEXICON

Hi everybody, I invite you to check out this video about the last Linguistics Class topic conversation  about Mental Lexicon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8HIAVTeGNk

Getting prepared for our great Linguistics class!

Linguistics has become for me in a great interest subject to study, and every day I want to learn more and more. 

Let's see what new concepts, and information our next Linguistics class brings for us!

VOCABULARY Hedge. T (2008)

It is incredible how we learn a language and sometimes we don't realize about all the strategies, and processes that we follow for getting that language, in addition many time we ask our students to get involved in some activities that we already used for learning something but we don't know that all these strategies and activities have a theory and a support. 

As it is mentioned in this chapter, there are some useful strategies for learning Vocabulary, such as COGNITIVE, KEYWORD, INFERENCING, AND METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES, in this last one Metacognitive we use some important activities like: Consciously collecting words from authentic contexts, making word cards, categorizing words into list, and many other.

I confess I have used these strategies in personal learning and in my classes an others like the Vocabulary notebook, as Hedge mentioned, but I added to the vocabulary pictures of it, for making easier to remember the words by doing association, other strategy was to label some things that were in my visual range. 

I invite you, my dear M.A in Languages Teaching Partners to share the strategies and activities that you use to learn and to teach vocabulary!

How could NEUROLINGUISTICS STUDIES benefit teaching and learning?

Good question!

If we start talking about how NEUROLINGUISTICS STUDIES benefit teaching and learning, we will have a lot of things to say. As far as we know Neurolinguistics investigates "Brain activity and Brain damage", according to this, nowadays, it is easier for educators when they are teaching,  to understand what are the problems, or difficulties that some of their students could present in their learning process, by recurring to neurolinguistics studies, theories and discoveries. 

For instance, we can mention  some very common brain disorders like:

Dyslexia
Disgraphia
Aphasia 
Stuttering
Autism 

All of these atypical languages developments have already been disovered and studied by Neurolinguistics, and for that reason in most if the causes, we can identify, what are the manifestations, the visual evidence of these problems and likewise the symptoms of each one of them, so Neurolinguistics have done a lot in research allowing the people who are in charge of the learning and teaching processes have the possibility to read, get informartion about the difficulties and at the same they can use strategies that have already proved in people with this kind of disabilities, in order to help them to learn and over come most of the language problems, and in this way to give a better option of education.