IELTS Teacher e-newsletter – October 2015

Inspired by the research

Before we begin, take this short quiz. Complete each gap with a word that starts with the given letter.

• Red and blue are both c_______.
• Fingers are usually on a person's h______.
• Jet is another word for p______.
• Cows, sheep, chickens are all farm a______.

You might have noticed that each quiz item was based on different kinds of lexical relationship. For example, 'X is like Y' (c – synonymy), 'X is part of Y' (b – meronymy), and 'X is a kind of' (a – hyponymy). We included the quiz here because it links to an interesting finding in one of the research articles on www.IELTS.org: An examination of discourse competence at different proficiency levels in IELTS Speaking Part 2 (Iwashita and Vasquez, 2015)

In their paper, Iwashita and Vasquez (2015) analysed the differences between part 2 speaking samples for band 5, 6, and 7 candidates. While the main focus of their study was to look at discourse patterns, one aspect of their study also explored how bands 5 - 7 differed lexical cohesion was created. But what lexical relationships did they notice? And were they distributed differently in different bands?

Iwashita and Vasquez (2015) reported that band 5 candidates used repetition more frequently than band 6 or band 7. This is understandable. Lower level candidates can sometimes use repetition as a communication strategy. Also, it is likely to happen because band 5 candidates have a more limited lexical resource.

One interesting difference was that band 6 candidates tended to use more hyponyms than band 5. And band 7 used even more hyponyms than band 6 candidates. Meronymy didn't stand out as a being a big differentiator across the bands.

So to get band 7 all candidates have to do is use more hyponyms, right? Well, no. They need to show overall language ability at CEFR C1 or above. Howvever, this finding might be the start of some useful activities for students to work on.

What is interesting working with hyponyms and meronyms, is that they form mini topics. For example, budgie/canary/parrot are all types of colourful birds; wheat/rice/potatoes/corn are all types of crop; earthquakes/tsunamis/hurricanes are all natural disasters.

Some simple activities to focus on hyponyms are:

• Give students three words and ask them to identify the hypernym e.g. 'parrot/canary/budgie are all ______.'
• Give students a hypernym and ask them to write down possible hyponyms. For low-level students they could write down hyponyms in their first language then afterwards, they could use a dictionary to find the ones they can't translate.
• Get students to apply their knowledge of hyponyms by creating and asking speaking part 1 questions e.g. 'What kinds of birds do you have in your country?'. For lower-levels, you might need to give them simple sentence frames such as 'Well, we have many types/kinds/sorts of ________. For example, there's _____, ______, _____. I guess one of the most common is _______.'
• Give students a speaking part 2 type prompt e.g. 'Describe a piece of equipment you would like to buy' and get them to use a sentence frame such as 'I thought about describing _______ but I've decided to talk about ______ because…'.

The first two ideas work well as vocabulary building activities or ways to record vocabulary. The last two examples might be particularly useful for students who have difficulty generating ideas.

Of course, only focussing on hyponyms and other aspects of lexical cohesion is not enough. There are many aspects of language that need to be looked at in order to effectively communicate. However, the findings do suggest some alternative ways to help different students.

Click here to read the research paper