Teaching cognates to young learners through reading tasks

Abstract

Even though there had been many technological changes, the use of text and reading is far from disappearing. In fact, a great part of what is visualized in technology is digital text which has been combined with sounds and images. According to UNESCO (2005, p.70) the lexical competence is an area of special interest in the field of English Language Teaching. Since the year (1993), teaching cognates has been studied by different authors and among then Nagy et al., who highlight the use of teaching words that have the same spelling and meaning in two languages to increase vocabulary. In the field of ELT, teaching cognates has a significant role given the fact that students will learn a foreign language and expand their lexis if they have an appropriate use of them. This area is defined by the Ministerio de Educación Nacional of Colombia (2006) as a competence that implies not only the use of fields such as grammar or semantics, but also its use in different situational contexts to make associations with words in the native and target language in order to expand and construct new ideas.