Guidelines on giving effactive explanations

Prepare

You may feel perfectly clear in your own mind about what needs clarifying, and therefore think that you can improvise a clear explanation. But experience shows that teachers’ explanations are often not as clear to their pupils as they are to themselves! It is worth preparing: thinking for a while about the words you will use, the illustrations you will provide, and so on; possibly even writing these out.

Make sure you have the class’s attention

One of the implications of this when giving the instructions for a group-working task is that it is advisable to give the instructions before you divide the class into groups or give out materials, not after!

Present the information more than once

A repetition of the necessary information may make all the difference: learners’ attention wanders occasionally, and it is important to give them more than one chance to understand what they have to do. Also, it helps to represent the information in a different mode: foe example, say it and also write it up on the board.

Be brief

Learners-in fact, all of us-have only a limited attention span; they cannot listen to you for along time with maximum concentration. Make your explanation as brief as you can, compatible with clarity. In some situations it may also mean using the learners’ mother tongue, as a more accessible and cost-effective alternative to the sometimes lengthy and difficult target- language explanation.

Illustrate with examples

You may explain, for instance, the meaning of a word, illustrating your explanation with examples of its use in various contexts, relating these as far as possible to the learners’ own lives and experiences.

Get feedback

When you have finished explaining, check what they have understood. It is not just enough to ask “Do you understand?”; learners will sometimes say they did even if they did not, out of politeness or unwillingness to lose face, or because they think they know what they have to do, but in fact completely misunderstood! It is better to ask them to do something that will show their understanding: to paraphrase in their own words, provide further illustration of their own.

 

WHAT IS ANTONYMY

Traditionally antonyms are defined as words that have opposite meaning. This definition is open to criticism. The latest linguistic investigations emphasize that antonyms are similar as words belonging to the same part of speech and the same semantic field, having the same grammatical meaning and functions, as well as similar collocations. Like synonyms antonyms are interchangeable at least at some contexts (hot in its figurative meaning “ angry, excited ” is chiefly combined with the names of unpleasant emotions: hot resentment, hot scorn; its antonym cold occurs with the same words). Unlike synonyms antonyms do not differ in style, or emotional colouring (they express, as a rule, emotional characteristics of the same intensity).

So antonyms are two or more words belonging to the same pat of speech, contradictory or contrary in meaning, and interchangeable at least at some contexts.

Almost every word can have one or more synonyms; comparatively few have antonyms because not all notions can be opposed to one another. Antonyms are primarily found in adjectives, nouns expressing quality and state.

It should be noted, that as words are polysemantic ones and the same words may have different antonyms (light bag-heavy bag; light wind-strong wind; light colors-dark colors).

Generally we may divide antonyms into 2 groups: absolute and derivational.

Absolute antonyms are subdivided into antonyms proper where opposition is gradual (cold (cool)-(warm) hot; large-little or small), complementaries having a binary opposition (dead-alive, single-married), conversives denoting one and the same referent from different points of view (to sell-to buy, to give to receive).

Derivational antonyms may be affixal (happy-unhappy, logical-illogical) or suffixal (hopeful-hopeless).

It is not always possible to replace a word by its opposite. Where it is possible you may notice that some words have several opposites depending on the context.

The opposite of “old”, for example, can be “new” or “young” depending on the situation.