Teach-Secondary-Issue-14.5

DICTIONARY DEEP DIVE Join David Voisin on a rich, and sometimes surprising journey through the points at which literacy, language and vocabulary intersect... SAME ROOT, DIFFERENTWORDS PARDON MY FRENCH Do you sometimes get the impression that you’ve already heard or felt something, but can’t place where? To describe that feeling you might employ the term‘ déjà vu ’ – which literally translates as ‘already seen’. To linger for a moment on the theme of memory, tourists wanting to imprint the good times they’ve had into their memory will often buy physical items that they can take home.We call such items ‘souvenirs’, from the French word for memory. Those wanting to immortalise their thoughts in words may do so by recording their pensées (French for thoughts) into a ‘memoir’ – a term deriving from the French word ‘ mémoire ’,meaning ‘long termmemory’. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS It’s funny how the terms ‘populist’ and ‘democrat’ can carry very different meanings while etymologicallymeaning the same thing – as if a Latin origin gives a word amore vulgarmeaning than its Hellenic cousin. But how should we, as educators, approach vocabulary? Should we try to popularise or democratise academic language? The latter term implies making it more accessible, while the first seems to bemore about making it ‘fancy’. Aword such as ‘facetious’ isn’t inherently anymore complex than ‘cheeky’ and ‘sassy’ (spelling notwithstanding). Social construction is what usually separates Tier 1 and Tier 2 words.Word usage is inevitably affected by the vagaries of history, which is why relatively few primary school children would have known the word ‘pandemic’ before 2020.My own son was using the term‘sarcastic’ fairly early on – not because he was linguistically precocious, but simply because he heard it often. To demonstrate the relevance of Tier 2 words such as ‘gratuitous’, ‘levity’, ‘frivolous’, I’ve variously used the subtitles of popular Netflix series, online reviews of video games and video clips of young stand-up comedians and influencers, thus showing how academic language is ubiquitous across all media, and not just the preserve of more conventional literature. We educators foster the language pupils hear in the classroom, but we also imbue the words we teach with positive or negative connotations. If you explicitly teach academic words, but rarely use anywhen addressing students, they’ll see through it. Sometimes, what we don’t say can speak volumes. TEACHING TIP: LET’S HAVE AWORD Many teachers will have sharedwith students that amusing line about howpunctuation can save lives, demonstrating it with the sentence ‘ Let’s eat, grandma ’ – but howmany of us realise that a sentence can have several meanings without changing its punctuation? It could be down to the presence of polysemous words (words with more than onemeaning), as in“ I want amatch. ”Grammatically dissecting sentences can help us better understand how grammar is used formeaning.The process is called ‘parsing’ – a grammatical decoupage of sentences into branch-like diagrams. Consider the sentence,“ I discussed going on holidaywithmy colleagues ”. It could have twomeanings, depending on whether you treat going on holiday and ‘withmy colleagues’ as one block or two different ones. Parsing sentences is also great for visually illustrating why certain sentences sound clumsy or cumbersome.A left-leaning formation will be more ponderous, as it will generatemore cognitive load. As Stephen Pinker explains in his book onmodern writing, ASense of Style ,“ Elegant and efficient writing can be taught explicitly, and grammar is a fantastic tool for this. ” David Voisin is a head of MFL Vac ating one’s mind of stress amounts to freeing it of worries and concerns To e vac uate a building means to empty it of its occupants Emptying the air in a chamber creates a vac uum 11 teachwire.net/secondary