Read the following sentences carefully

1 Read the following sentences carefully.

Last night I tried to do my homework. However, I kept making mistakes because the man upstairs was doing his exercises and making a noise.

Make usually means to create, bring into existence, or produce a result.

Do usually means to perform an action. However, there are exceptions to this 'rule', as you will see in Exercise 3.

from Bell J and Gower R, Intermediate Matters, Longman

One problem with a rule-based approach is that the scope of the rule is not always clear. How many, and which, adjectives can be turned into verbs by the addition of -en, for example? Sweet and fresh — yes, but wet and dry? There is the added problem of the lack of one-to-one match between forms and categories. For example, in- and un- both express negation (uncertain, inactive), but in- can also be used with the meaning of in, or within (as in inclusive). And when do we use in-, as opposed to un- or non- or dis-, to convey negation? How, for example, does the learner know whether to use unsatisfied, dissatisfied, insatisfied or nonsatisfied ?

Other pattern-highlighting techniques involve the use of texts and include the following:

-  learners are given a text and asked to search for and underline all compound nouns, negative prefixes, multi-word units, etc.

-  learners find words in a text that are derivations. For example, 'Find three words in the text that are derived from sense ...'

-  learners classify these derivations according to which part of speech they are

-  learners categorise underlined words in a text according to a common affix, or according to the word formation principle they exemplify (compounding, conversion, etc.)

The more of these kinds of operations the learner does the better, since (as we saw in the last chapter) the more decisions the learner makes about a word the greater the depth of processing.

A great advantage of working from texts is that the words that are to be focused on are already in context, hence their meanings may be clearer than if presented as isolated words in a list. Also, and perhaps more importantly, the shared context will bring words together that are commonly associated. In the following text, for example, there are a number of words associated with time, crime and the law.

An approach to focusing on these features might be:

• Ask students to read the text and to answer comprehension questions to gauge level of understanding. For example:

1  The maximum time you can be detained without charge is:

 a 24 hours b 36 hours c 60 hours

2  You can be detained for 36 hours only if:

a.  a a serious arrestable offence has been committed,

b.  b a magistrate gives permission,

c.  c further questioning is necessary.

• Ask learners (working together and using dictionaries) to underline all words relating to legal processes, and to categorise these according to a) people, b) processes.

• Ask them to use dictionaries to make verbs for these nouns: limit, detention, charge, offence, questioning, suspect, and to make nouns of these verbs: arrest, detain, commit, extend, secure, preserve. Which of the verb forms can take -able to form an adjective?

• Ask them to circle all time expressions with numbers and note the prepositions used in each case.

• Ask learners to identify the verbs that fill these slots: ______a person

without charge; _________an offence; __________a suspect in custody;

_______a suspect before a magistrate; ___________a time limit.

• Ask learners to rewrite the passage in 'plain English', e.g. as if they were explaining it to a friend. Alternatively, ask them to translate it into their own language.

• Learners then use the rewritten (or translated) passage as a basis for reconstructing the original text. They then compare the reconstruction with the original.

• A follow-up activity might be to ask learners to research and summarise this aspect of the legal system in their own country (respecting, of course, their cultural sensitivities).

Note that this text, although short, is difficult and the tasks would be achievable only by quite advanced learners. Nevertheless, the same tasks could be adapted to much easier texts, and used at lower levels.

To summarise, then: the teaching of the grammar of word formation and word combination can be approached from two directions: early instruction in the rules, or the learning of a quantity of vocabulary items from which these rules are slowly distilled. We have looked at the case for a midway position that recognises the need for early exposure but at the same time accepts that consciousness-raising through focused attention can speed up the process of 'getting a feel for it'. Plentiful exposure plus consciousness- raising is a key principle underlying what has come to be known as a lexical approach.