Sports
Collocations
The purpose of this task is to encourage the students to use vocabulary in context, helping them to express thoughts in front of their classmates and by that experimentation, learning accurate grammar structures. To succeed in this task is needed to apply the Lexical Approach in a Seventh grade elementary class. The topic is taken from the text given by the Government called “Travellers” and the Unit 3 “The world of Sports”. The objective is to improve the speaking abilities of the students and to reinforce the vocabulary in context.
The class starts with the teacher asking about the students’ favourite sports and if they practice some sports. The teacher will explain that to improve their opinions they will need some words that go together and are called “collocations” and that this class they are going to learn some of them related to sports. The teacher will give the students a hand-out with the vocabulary and collocations needed. Afterwards, they will have to make sentences using at least 4 collocations with each sport and interchange them with their classmates in order to expand their knowledge.
The materials needed to do this activity are the textbook “Travellers”, the hand-out with collocations, pencil and a copybook.
What we learnt through this activity is that sports are a very good topic to get closer to the students and to encourage debate about the importance of physical activities to young people and how healthy is to perform these kind of activities to keep body and mind in perfect conditions. We also learnt that it is no necessary to use grammar as the main focus of the class, but to make the students experiment with grammar in order to acquire the uses of lexical structures.
Lexical Approach