Teaching Vocabulary at CAE level by Simon Haines

Cambridge University Press, ETAS and the ESOL centre of St. Gallen, Thurgau, Appenzell AR/AI, invite you to the following workshop:

Teaching Vocabulary at CAE level by Simon Haines

Thursday 25 March 2010, 17.00 – 19.00

Cambridge ESOL SG GmbH
Hechtackerstr. 41
CH- 9014 St Gallen

Please register your interest with ETAS by emailing st.gallen@e-tas.ch by March 15th. There will be a 35 Sfr registration fee and an apero and finger buffet will be provided.

Teaching Vocabulary at CAE level

By the time most students start a CAE course, they will have an extensive vocabulary related to everyday topics, but will not be prepared for the heavy lexical demands of the CAE exam. In addition to understanding authentic reading texts and recordings of normal, native-speaker speech, students will have to deal with searching exam tasks which test their knowledge of a wide range of specialist vocabulary, collocations, idioms, prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs and other "lexico-grammatical items". These present a huge challenge to many students. Prolonged exposure to spoken and written English would, of course, provide students with the most effective means of overcoming this challenge but, as they say, life's too short. We need to make students familiar with the lexical demands of the exam, and then give them concrete advice and strategies to cope with these. In this workshop, I will suggest ways in which teachers can help students raise their vocabulary level. I will be considering the following issues and questions:

• The demands of the CAE exam
• What does it mean to know a lexical item?
• The advantages of learning vocabulary as part of a language chunk
• Is it possible to systematize vocabulary teaching and learning?
• Preparing students for the randomness of CAE-level vocabulary items.

Presenter

Simon Haines has taught EFL at all levels and been involved in EFL teacher training, at both Certificate and Diploma level for over 25 years. He currently teaches part-time at Colchester Institute, a further education college in Essex. He has written many EFL coursebooks and supplementary materials, including Cambridge English Skills Real Writing (Level 4), Advanced Skills and his most recent co-authored publication Complete CAE.