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Dear Colin
This is Shao Lizhen from Hubei.
Thank you for your sharing of the latest information and teaching resources in the IELTS Teacher workshop [in November]. It was nice to have my knowledge of IELTS refreshed, and the teaching methods and materials you introduced could be really supportive to my future teaching.
However, I've got a question that I am confused about.
For Speaking band descriptors, when you referred to Lexical Resource, you clarified the difference between "precise words" and "big words" for "less common words", but what about idioms? As the phrase "idiomatic vocabulary" appears only in band 7 description and above, as "uses some less common and idiomatic vocabulary…", which means if someone is targeted at band 7 or above in lexical resource, he/she must show his/her understanding of and be able to use idioms in the test.
Therefore, as a teacher, shall I teach and encourage students to use idioms? As for me, some of the idioms are really NOT COMMON, and sometimes it is odd to use idioms in informal talking, just as what you mentioned about "cheng yu" in Chinese, which makes you sound not real in daily conversation if you use a lot of them. But "idiomatic vocabulary" is there in the band descriptors! Thus, I am quite confused about this, and hesitated in teaching idioms to students.
What should I do? If it is essential for me to teach idioms, do you have any suggestions of effective teaching methods or teaching materials, like which idioms are more actively used by native speakers?
Your suggestions would be of great value to me. I'm looking forward to your reply.
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Hi Shirley,
Thank you for your questions. Hopefully the following will be useful
You are correct when you say that some idioms are not common and sound odd when use in informal spoken language. For this reason the band descriptors don't talk about idioms but rather idiomatic vocabulary/language i.e. vocabulary that is characteristic of native-like speech. It's not about using those very colourful idioms such as 'it's raining cats and dogs' or 'every coin has two sides'. It's more to do with using language which is typically used by native speakers. For the classroom, this means focussing on collocations and colligation. Making sure that students find and learn sequences of (high-frequency) words such as fixed expressions, semi-fixed expressions which they hear very proficient users of English saying.
A simple classroom activity is to work with good quality audio transcripts. After students have understood the ideas in the transcript, ask them to categorise words, and probably more importantly sequences of words, into three groups: 'English words/sentence patterns/sentences that I use', 'English words/sentence patterns/sentences that I understand but don't use', 'English words/sentence patterns/sentences that I don't know'. Then get them to ignore the final group of words ('English words/sentence patterns/sentences that I don't know') and try to retell the passage using the words in the first two groups. This exercise focusses on moving passive knowledge into active use. As a teacher you can also see what kind of language patterns they focus on, after all, a good learner will be able to identify what is useful and what is not useful for usage – often poor learners just fill up their brain with more and more individual words and often words which aren't used that much.
From a research perspective you could also look at this article:http://www.ielts.org/PDF/Vol6_Report7.pdf…on pages 17 and 18 you can see examples of idiomatic vocabulary.
Hope this helps!
By the way, could I use your questions in our IELTS Newsletter?
Best,
Colin
Updates and information about the test is available on www.chinaIELTS.org and www.IELTS.org
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