REFLECTION+ON+THE+GLASGOW+ONLINE+CONFERENCE+“VOCABULARY+CHOICE+FOR+TOILORED+LANGUAGE+COURSES”+BY+MAHMUT+KARACA

REFLECTION ON “VOCABULARY CHOICE FOR TOILORED LANGUAGE COURSES” BY MAHMUT KARACA

The Conference I have watched on Glasgow Online is “Vocabulary choice for tailored language courses” by Helena Metslang.

This conference was about how to use simple IT tools to create word lists for language courses. I think that the conference was very beneficial for teachers especially for the ones who will teach to the classes in which there are immigrant students. Every year immigrant students join classes of various age groups at different schools. Supportive language courses are conducted to help the non-native students to cope with science, history and other subjects. The teachers need to know what the crucial vocabulary to teach is. I believe this is a very important issue, and in that talk I have learned very beneficial things for me.

In the presentation, the presenter mentioned her project that helps language teachers and book authors plan their language course and study materials by using automatic language tools. She talked about some stages and points, and I liked them very much. These stages and points are: Instruction will be given how to pick the right vocabulary to teach to non-native students at primary and early secondary school. When preparing such courses, the teacher must plan the vocabulary groups carefully: general vocabulary, academic vocabulary that is common for all the subjects and suitable for the age-group and field-specific vocabulary. The talk mostly focused on the methods to create your small text collection (corpus) and how to use language software to automatically find out the most frequently used and necessary vocabulary and the primary contexts where the words occur (e.g. by using freeware Simple Concordance Program). The second half of the talk focused on how to pick the vocabulary that is suitable for the students’ current level of English, how to separate academic and subject-specific vocabulary from general words and how to use these lists for planning the course and tailoring study materials.

To sum up, I think that the language that the teachers use in the class is very important. The teachers should pick the words carefully so that the students can easily understand them. If not, the students cannot understand what is going on or understand some parts of it. As we learnt the interaction between the teachers and students are very important so we as teachers should be careful about our language to increase the interaction with student. I can say that this conference helped me a lot to have an idea in that topic and I will try to do my best when I become a teacher.