Vocabulary
It is a known fact, supported by abundant studies that vocabulary is the strongest predictor of language knowledge in all 4 skills. Thus, special emphasis has been placed on the teaching, learning and assessment of vocabulary, which will only grow in the next few years.
A designated area with relevant teaching materials and resources (including the updated activity booklet written by the expert Penny Ur) has been uploaded to the English inspectorate site to address this important lexical focus.
Very intensive work on a core list of lexical items to serve English teachers will be published in the upcoming revised curriculum. These lists will be provided in 3 levels and be divided into:
- Single words according to frequency
- Chunks which include frequently used phrases, phrasal verbs and binomials including examples when there are multiple meanings.
To create the list, the committee members consulted multiple sources such as Global Web - GlwBe corpus of global web based English, Liu's list of expressions (2012), Martinex & Schmitt - Phrasal expression list (2012), Garnier & Schmitt Phrasal verbs (2015).
Online English Inspectorate Summer School Conference - New Leads in English Instruction: Integrating Distance Learning. Keynote: Corpus for Courses: Turning Your Course Materials into a Corpus, Prof. Tom Cobb
Dr. Elisheva Barkon, Diane Shmitt, Norbert Shmitt meeting with teacher trainers in Israel, February 2019.