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Role play
Role play activites can involve a written text on which the role play is based and many involve written instruction to the role players. The “Say it!” activity combines these features and is a simple introduction to roleplay. In Say it! learners read a short text such as a newspaper report containing the wanted vocabulary. They can read it and disucss it together i fthey wish. Then they look at a grid containing tshort tasks for them to permorm. The columns in the grid are labelled with the lettters A, B, C and the rows are numbered. The first learner in the group says the reference of a square, for example, B2, and the second learner in the has to perform the task contained in that square. After that the second learner says a square reference and the third learner has to perform that task. This continues around the group. The same task may be performed more than once by different learners in the group.Here is the newspaper report on which the following Say it! is based. The learners need to read the report carefully and discuss it before doing the activity.

Castaways Survived on Shark’s Blood
Three fishermen who drifted on the Pacific for four months told yesterday how they drank shark’s blood to survive.
The fishermen from Kiribati told their story through an interpreter in the American Samoa capital of Pago Pago after being rescured by the ship Sakaria.

Kautea Teaitoa, Veaieta Toanuea, and Tebwai Aretana drifted 400 kilometres from home after their outboard motor failed on February 8.

They said four ships had refused to help them during thier ordeal.

When they were picked up on June 4 they had eaten the last of a one-metre shark four days before and drunk all of its blod.

‘I have not prayed so much in all my life,’ Mr Aretana said.

A	B	C	D
1	You are Kautea. Say what helped you survive	You are Tebwai Aretana. How did you feel when the ships refused to help you?	You are a sailor on the Sakaria. What did you do to help the fishermen?
2	You are Tebwai. Explain why you were in the boat and what happened after it broke down.	You are Kautea. How did you feel when you caught the shark?	You are the captain. Explain why you stopped.
3	You are Veaieta. Explain what caused the problem.	You are the interpreter. Describe the feelings and appearance of the three men.	The journey was called an ordeal. Why was it an ordeal?

Notice that the tasks in each square are designed to encourage use of the wanted vocabulary and that they require the learners to reshape what was in the text to suit the viewpoint of the task. If the text is read, discussed, understood and then put away beforedoing the activity, then retrieval is encouraged. The role play nature of the tasks encourages generative use of the vocabulary.

Larger problem solving rold play activities can involve substatial written input that needs to be processed in a similar way (Nation, 1991b). Learners need to read about the background to the problem, the problem, the constraints on the solution, and their own roles.

There is much that comes before this section that is also very interesting, however as soon as I read this I wanted to try the activity out in my class. It not only sounds engaging but I can definitely see how it is promoting vocabulary acquisition. I highly recommend reading this book if you have the time.

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Noticing
Noticing is about noticing the word in the first place and recognizing it as an unknown. Noticing involves a number of things, but most importantly the learner recognizes that they have encountered the word before, but it is used slightly differently this time, they recognize that the word is important to the current context and that they are unfamiliar with it, and the learner is also motivated and interested in learning the word. Additionally learners willdecontextualize the word when noticing it. 

At first this seemed awkward to me as I believe that context is important for language acquisition. However the decontextualization is focusing on the word to better understand it. Decontextualization may occur consciously or subconsciously in a variety of ways:

• While listening or reading, the learner notices that a word is new or thinks,’I have seen that word before, ‘ or thinks, ‘that word is used differently from the ways I have sen it used before.’
• The teacher highlights a word while writing it on the blackboard.
• The learners negotiate the meaning of a word with each otheror with the teacher
• The teacher explains a word for the learners by giving a definition, a synonym, or a first language translation.
page 65

Within noticing we should also consider the effect that negotiation has on vocabulary acquisition. When learners discuss amongst themselves trying to determine the meaning of a word what they learn is more strongly in their memory. Interestingly, learners who observe other students negotiating learn the word equally as well as the negotiators. This is clearly beneficial for large classes where one student and the teacher negotiate the meaning of a word or even in smaller groups where one or two students don’t actively participate but mostly listen. They too are learning.

Retrieval
Noticing a word leads to learning the word, but retrieval will strengthen the meaning in the mind of the learner. This is particularly true when the word is retrieved in a learning task shortly after noticing it. Nation discusses astudy by Baddeley which suggests that ”not simply repetition which is important but the repeated opportunity to retrieve the item which is to be learned.” Each repetition leads to a strengthening of the meaning of the word in memory. Additionally each meeting and retrieval of a word further broadens the definition so that eventually with repeated exposures and uses the learner will come to learn the full meaning of each word encountered.

It is important however that the time between encounters is not too long. This is particularly important for the first two to three exposures. Repetition is only beneficial if the learner remembers that they have encountered the word previously. If they do not remember the previous meeting then the current encounter acts like an initial encounter. At the end of this section Nations states:

it is very useful to try to estimate how much listeningandreaqding a learneer would need to be doing per week in order for incidental receptive vocabulary learning to proceed in an effective way....on aveerage learners would need to listen to stories at least three times a week for about fifteen minutes each time. they would need to read about one graded reader every two weeks.

page 68

Creative or Generative Use
The next part is about generative use, which to me is a new term. I will quote Nations first paragraph explaining this term:

The third major process that may lead to a word being remembered is generation. There is now an increasing number of studies that showthat generative processing is an important factor in first and second language vocabulary learning. Generative processing occurs when previously met words are subsequently met or used in ways that differ from the previous meeting with the word. At its moststriking, the new meeting with the word forces learners to reconceptualise their knowledge of that word.

Generative use can be receptive or productive. Receptive when the word is encountered in reading or listening and has a slightly different meaning, but it can also be productive. Where the meaning of the word is stretched beyond the known by the learner.

Additionally generative use has degrees of generation. Merely adding a strengthener to a word such as very deep to indicate than an body of water is dangerous for swimming is only minor generation. However if heavy were to be used in an entirely different context perhaps with metaphorical meaning as in The book in question that delves into the deeper meaning of relationships in the modern age clearly there is a greater degree of generation.

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This entry took me over two weeks to write. I’ve been very busy and haven’t had as much time as I would like to read more on the subject and think more carefully about it. In particular the last section has been rushed.

Over all I highly recommend this book as I have learned a lot so far and am looking forward to reading the rest.

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