Abstract
This article underscores the importance of keeping up to date with vocabulary which is currently employed in English-speaking countries. It argues that textbooks, dictionaries and even corpora are not the most reliable sources to do this, and puts forward a pedagogical proposal – grounded in the Lexical Approach and three pedagogical innovation projects – to incorporate ‘real’ English into the language classroom. After clarifying what is meant by such ‘real’ English expressions and providing a possible classification for them, it suggests diverse sources of ‘real’ English input – including telecollaboration, sitcoms and TV series, podcasts, Internet texts, and recent bestsellers –, and subsequently presents a set of tried-and-true activities to exploit them, activities which allow the incorporation of pedagogically innovative approaches into the ELT classroom. The ultimate aim is to link the classroom with what goes on beyond its confines and to make our students’ lexical competence approximate that of native English speakers.
Highlights
It is a known fact that “No language stays still” (Eaves-Walton 1999:6) and that “All languages change” (Swan 2005:4)
Youtube is a priceless source of documents to work on updated English in a motivating way: for example, we have used some medicine commercials currently showing in the States (e.g. Zyrtec, Singulair, Advil) to work on vocabulary related to health from a different perspective to that provided by the textbook
We have argued that these sources are no longer valid in making the link with the ‘real’ English language which is currently being used beyond the confines of the classroom, especially at a time of tremendous linguistic change like the one we are living
Summary
It is a known fact that “No language stays still” (Eaves-Walton 1999:6) and that “All languages change” (Swan 2005:4). Another oft-cited source of updated ‘real’ English are study abroad programmes The latter, deemed essential in the current European and North American literature (Bologna Declaration 1999; Pratt et al 2008), involve study periods in English-speaking countries, where direct contact with native speakers of the language can favour picking up English which is used. In Eaves-Walton’s terms (op.cit.:6), for a native speaker, “a ‘slip’ may just be evidence of English getting past its ‘sell-by date’ – and that’s an expression I wouldn’t have used ten years ago!” These sojourns to English-speaking countries are beyond our scope as language teachers – as Seidlhofer (2002) puts it, our aim is for students to incorporate the lexicon they receive as input in the classroom. The methodological suggestions for keeping up to date with and teaching these ‘real’ English expressions shall be fleshed out, and the most outstanding conclusions will be drawn in the final section of the article
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