Mod 6 Discussion: Language Acquisition in a Cultural Context

In working with my junior and senior ELL students in the acquisition of new vocabulary, whether that vocabulary was presented in a text or article of was part of a vocabulary list, we took a closer look at relevant cognates. Vocabulary tests, which were a combination of matching definitions to words and then creating original sentences in which the words were used correctly. To prepare for vocabulary tests were played a jeopardy style cognate vocabulary game. Some of the jeopardy categories were focused on the linguistic history of the word or the definitions across cultures. Other jeopardy categories focused on aspects of the culture of the cognate (i.e. Latin or Spanish). We used a similar jeopardy game approach to learn about words with the same prefixes.