The Use of a Book of Photos in Initial Comprehension Learning

by Greg Thomson

© 1989 Greg Thomson. Used by permission.

Complete Table of Contents

Summary

This essay by Greg Thomson tells you how to set up and use a photo book for second language acquisition. It describes the kind of pictures to take and the way you can use them in various ways with a speaker of another language to learn to understand a variety of vocabulary and grammatical structures. This information, in connection with other writings by Greg Thomson, can help you quickly develop your listening comprehension in a second language.

Setting up the photo book

Nouns, transitive subjects and objects

First pass:. Identifying humans in the pictures

Second pass:. Identify objects which are especially associated with the people in the pictures

Third pass:. Simple transitive sentences

Other basic sentence types, locations, instruments

Fourth pass:. Lots of verbs

Fifth pass:. Existential sentences, more nouns, locations, instruments

Summary of first week

Going on--emphasis still on simplex sentences

Tenses/aspects

Constituents of noun phrases

Negation, questions, commands, modality, voice

Coordination, and related phenomena

Other NP business

Noun roles

More complex structures

You can't get everything by one method

Unstructured use

Monolingual use

Later use, and better planned photo books

Conclusion

Back Matter

Reference