TKT KAL Sample Papers

See the TKT: KAL Sample Paper questions 1–6 for an example task in which lexical units are touched on. https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingqualifications/kal
Questions 14–20 in the same sample paper cover the area of multi-word verbs.


See the TKT: KAL Sample Paper questions 1–6 for an example task in which word formation is touched on
Spelling rules are covered in questions 7–13 of the same sample paper
https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingqualifications/kal

See the TKT: KAL Sample Paper questions 1–6 for an example task in which sense relations are included. https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingqualifications/kal

Taken from TKT KAL, Cambridge Resources for teachers

Register

Style

A characteristic way of conveying information e.g. humorous, journalistic, casual, business-like (ironic, poetic, literary)

Register

Levels of formality

The formality or informality of the language used in a particular situation.  Formal register or language is that used in

serious or important situations, e.g. in a job application.  Informal register or language is that used in relaxed or

friendly situations, e.g. with family or friends.

Domain – specific vocabulary

Register may also refer to language which is specific to a particular group, e.g. technical register, scientific register.

Taken from http://www.cambridgeesol.org/assets/pdf/exams/tkt/tkt-glossary.pdf

“Registers are varieties of language defined by their topic and context of use; the language of medicine, education, law, computers, etc. come into this category:

e.g. minor is the legal term for child

insolvent is the banking term for penniless

cardiac arrest is the medical term for heart attack”

“Working with Words” Pages 20, 21, Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman, Cambridge University Press, 1998

These items are similar in conceptual meaning but different in register and style

Children (neutral)

Offspring (formal, sometimes humorous)

Nippers (colloquial, often humorous)

Kids (colloquial)

Brats (colloquial, derogatory)

These are some more examples taken from “Working with words”

Emoluments: Formal (usually financial)

Cosine: Mathematics (technical, trigonometry)

A shrink: colloquial, US, usually humorous.

Hence: Formal (e.g. a mile hence), but can be neutral (e.g. I’ve got a job- hence the new suit)

Loo: colloquial, GB

Communicative competence: language teaching register

Bonkers: slang, GB

Lexico-grammatical features

Grammatical function of words and morphemes

Grammatical function of words

When preparing a vocabulary lesson it is important to think about some questions in order to clarify how to use the vocabulary accurately by avoiding potential grammatical errors

Regular/Irregular forms:

When presenting language teachers should clarify regular and common irregular forms. In some cases they require special attention such as in irregular verbs, verb patterns, countable and uncountable nouns, adjective versus adverb.

Checklist:

“Working with Words” Pages 44, 45, Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman, Cambridge University Press, 1998

Grammatical function of  morphemes

Morphemes:  the minimal parts of words that contain meaning

Bound morphemes:  Cannot be used independently, they need to be bound to another morpheme

Free morphemes: Can stand alone

grammatical morpheme: Markers such as the past participle 'ed used in the past tense,  the present participle 'ing' used in the present progressive, or third person singular 's'. Here are some examples:

        present progressive ing:     He is playing.

        plurals s:                                Ten pencils.

        possesive 's:                        John's hat.

        past tense ed:                        I cleaned the floor.

http://bogglesworldesl.com/glossary/grammaticalmorphemes.htm

girls = girl + -s

It seems that girls can be broken down into two parts, the first of which refers to something in the world (a young female human being) and the second indicating a grammatical category – in this case number – and specifying plural.

The same approach can easily be applied to other kinds of words.

kicked = kick + -ed

While girls is a noun kicked is a verb, yet the same rules apply. Kicked can be segmented into the first part that describes a kind of action (kick) and the second part that adds the information past tense (-ed). Tense is another grammatical category that can be encoded morphologically in English.

Think about what kinds of words take which endings for a moment. Only verbs (talked, laughed, pushed, loved) allow us to add information about tense, whereas only nouns (girls, boys, zebras, chairs) permit marking number.

http://introling.ynada.com/session-6-types-of-morphemes

Grammatical Morphemes (two types)

  Definition: Signal grammatical and semantic roles or modify or qualify meaning (“bound” or “free”):

Free Grammatical  Morphemes:

(basically, function words)

A “closed class” Defn:  Words that can stand alone which (1) Signal grammatical & semantic roles & relationships;

(2) Qualify  or modify meaning (e.g., gender for pronouns)

Articles, prepositions, conjunctions, disjunctions, pronouns

Examples: the, a an, to, of, by, for, and, but, his, her

Bound Grammatical  Morphemes

“Inflectional Morphemes” Defn:  Suffixes that (1)  indicate grammatical & semantic roles and relationships; and (2)

Qualify or modify meaning.

Complete list:

{-pl}:  plural morpheme

{-poss}: possessive

{-3 rd person sg. present}

{-present participle}

{-past participle}

{-er comparative} “higher”

{-est superlative} “highest”

part of speech unchanged

(happy – happily : The part of speech would change from adjective to adverb)

http://facstaff.unca.edu/tlbrown/PsyLang/morphemehandout.pdf

Lexical Units

Collocations

 

Collocations are words that are found together in language, that is to say, that are used together frequently. Collocations can be fixed, where it is difficult to replace one of the words with an alternative, or freer, allowing for more choice of words.

Example : 'Utter disaster' is a fixed collocation, as there are few words that can be used instead of 'disaster'. 'Make a cake' is a freer collocation, as there are many words that can be used instead of 'cake'.

Some words collocate because they reflect a common real world situation, such as pass me the salt; however, there are some words that English speakers have chosen to say, for example that lions ”roar” instead of “bellow”

“The most common types of collocations are as follows:

            a)subject noun + verb e.g. The earth revolves around the sun.

                                                       The lion roared.

If we want to describe the movement of the earth in relation to the sun, then “earth” + “revolve” is a likely combination. It would be less common, for example, to use “circulate”

b) verb + object noun e. g. She bites her nails.

On the whole,  we would not use “eat” here , though many other languages would.

c) Adjective + noun e.g. a loud noise, heavy traffic

Notice how a different collocation (e.g. for “noise”, a “big noise” would give an entirely different meaning)

d) adverb + past participle used adjectivally e.g. badly dressed, fully insured”

 

“Working with Words” Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman, Cambridge University Press, 1998

 

Collocations – Cambridge Resources for teachers examples:

set the table,  to log on, brand new,  hideously expensive, a sharp drop,  (it) rose dramatically , to work hard , the cat’s tail,  broken fence, high rise; acute stress; potato chips; dangerous driver

 

Fixed phrases

 

Fixed phrases are phrases whose meaning cannot be deducted by the sum of each of their parts.

A lexical phrase is a group of words which forms a grammatical unit of some kind and which exhibits a degree of 'inflexibility'some are totally 'frozen' (unchangeable) while others are rather variable:

• Invariable phrases: by and large, as well, let alone, so be it
• Somewhat variable phrases: Don't rock the boat, She's rocking the boat…[rock the boat = 'disturb the institutional status quo']

It is often claimed that certain long clichés are remembered like single items of vocabulary, e.g., There's no time like the present; Never a dull moment; It never rains but it pours, God only knows. If so, there can be lexical sentences. (Multi-word lexical unit would therefore be a better term than lexical phrase.)

Some lexical phrases are highly idiomatic (i.e., unguessable from component words)—e.g., by and large (= 'generally'). Others are not—e.g., pick up a bad habit (whose meaning can easily be guessed by a learner who knows a common meaning of each word in the phrase).

In terms of form, lexical phrases are categorized in various ways. Here is one—

• polyword - at any rate, by and large, as well [= 'also']
• frame or slot - the [adj.]-er the [adj]–er, as [adj]….as,
• so [adj]…that… ,
• Little did…realize that…
• sentence head - Could you....., God only knows wh-…
• sentence tail - …, if you would., …and so on.
• cliché There's more than one way to skin a cat.

http://www.hltmag.co.uk/mar03/mart1.htm  Seth Lindstromberg

 

Fixed Phrases: Cambridge Resources for teachers examples:

to sum up, come in handy, to tell you the truth, one way or another, so to speak, the thing is , more or less, as a matter of fact , time and again, you might as well, generally speaking, better late than never; sooner or later

 

 

Idiom

 

A group of words that are used together, in which the meaning of the whole word group is different from the meaning of each individual word, e.g. She felt under the weather means that she felt ill.

Idioms normally cannot be modified or the words within them changed.

Not all idioms are fixed. Sometimes the tense of the verb can be changed: "I'm going to have forty winks" or "I had forty winks" And sometimes the adjective can be varied: "You'd better keep a careful/close/sharp/watchful eye on her

One of the problems for language learners is that idioms tend to be culturally bound.

A good example of this is "as cool as a cucumber" The connection between cool and cucumber is far from obvious. However, every native speaker will naturally put the two words together. In English we say "as stubborn as a mule" whereas in Turkish the association is "as stubborn as a pig" In English we say "as strong as an ox" whereas in Dutch the association is "as strong as a bear"

 

www.hltmag.co.uk/feb12/less01.rtf

 

“It is often metaphorical: He put the cat among the pigeons; don’t count your chickens”

Teaching Collocation, Michael Lewis, LTP Teacher training

 

Idioms- Cambridge Resources for teachers examples:

a little bird told me, to learn the ropes, runs in the family, up to his eyes in work, drag and drop, on its last legs, to be in someone’s bad books,  take something in your stride, to let the cat out of the bag; to feel under the weather, to take off

 

 

 

Formulaic Phrases

 Functional vocabulary . Some lexical phrases have 'speech-functional meaning'. For example, Could I…? has the function in speech of introducing a request. Others have lexical meaning, which is to say that they are directly definable. Phrasal (or multi-word) verbs are like this. For instance, bump into is definable as 'meet by chance'.

As with vocabulary generally, lexical phrases may be formal (Would you mind if…?) or informal (Put up or shut up, Gimme… = 'Give me…', D'ya wanna…? = 'Do you want to…').

http://www.hltmag.co.uk/mar03/mart1.htm  Seth Lindstromberg

Formulaic Phrases:  Cambridge Resources for teachers examples:

Bye for now, How are you? Is this seat free?, Get a move on,  No worries,  See you later, How’s it going?,  Sleep well, Cheers, Have a good day, one solution to the problem might be...; I’d like to suggest

 

 

Word Formation

For the first part of this section(morphemes, affixation and compounds) I read “An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and their Structure, Andrew Carstairs – McCarthy, Edinburgh University Press” Chapters 3 and 6. I also used the lesson plan on Word formation available on the Cambridge website

https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingresources

 

Morphemes: the smallest possible units of meaning in a language. They must be identifiable from one word to the other  and contribute in some way to the meaning of the whole word. For example helpfulness can be divided into  these three morphemes: help  ful   ness, all three parts are meaningful  and at the same time contribute to the meaning of  helpfulness.

 

Out of the three morphemes help ful ness, help is the morpheme that provides the most precise and concrete meaning to the word helpfulness.  The morpheme help can also stand alone. That is why this type of morpheme is called free. The morphemes ful and ness are called bound  because they cannot stand on their own, they have to be “bound”  to other morphemes.

 

Affixation: There are three kinds of affixation in English: prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Prefixes are attached to the beginning of a word, infixes are added in the middle (to the base morpheme) and suffixes are attached to the end of a word. Affixes can have a grammatical function e.g. plural ‘s’ or the past tense ending ‘–ed’. They may also change a word’s lexical set, e.g. happy-happiness, careful-carefully. Often prefixes and suffixes also have particular meanings attached to them e.g. un-/ il-/ ir-/ re- have a negative meaning when attached to an adjective.

Compounds: These are words formed from two or more words, and the meaning of which comes from both words in the compound. Compounds can only be nouns, e.g. bookshelf, evening meal, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions.

Here are some examples: old- fashioned, good looking, thereupon, whatsoever, dry-clean, underestimate, overcook.

Acronyms: A word formed from the first letters of several words and that is pronounceable as a normal word, e.g. JPEG or radar. Sometimes it is also used to refer to just a string of initials representing the first letter in a group of words but pronounced as letters rather than as a word, e.g. HTML, ESL, ESOL, ASAP.

Spelling rules: These are rules which govern how words are written in English. They help particularly with knowing when to double letters and the spelling of adverbs. They can also guide the spelling of silent letters i.e. letters in a word which do not contribute to a word’s pronunciation, e.g. climb, knife, sign.

This website has some examples  http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/spelling.htm

Abbreviation: A short form of a word or phrase, e.g. in addresses, Rd is an abbreviation of Road

Again, a great source of examples

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/abbreviations.htm

Word families: These are words which all come from the same base word, e.g. direct, direction, director, directing, undirected

learn, learner, learning, learned, unlearned

 

 

 

Sense Relationships

I strongly suggest that you use the teacher resources that Cambridge offers for TKT KAL (https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/teachingresources), the Sense Relationships lesson plan is particularly good. Not only does it include a guided discovery approach to the content, which makes it very “hands-on” but it also provides a TKT KAL sample task on “Sense relationships”

I also found this website http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/metonymy.htm very useful

Here’s  my summary

 

·         Synonyms: words that mean the same or nearly the same

·         Antonyms: words that mean the opposite

·         Hyponyms: words which are specific examples of a type of thing (a general word=superordinate) Hyponyms of the Superordinate “fruits” are bananas, apples, oranges, strawberries.

·         Lexical set: many words are related to other words that cover a wider or smaller range of meaning, e.g “sweater” is included within the lexical set “clothes”. Similarly “sweater” itself includes “polo-neck” sweater.

·         False Friends: words which in translation suggest another meaning. A very common one  for Spanish speakers is sensible and sensitive.

·         Superordinate: words which are the name for a type or category of thing. A word which is more generic than a given word or group of words, e.g. “fruits” is the superordinate of bananas, apples, oranges, strawberries.

·         Metonymy Whole/Part:  one part of the whole is used to refer to the whole.

"The following trivial metonymic [utterance] may serve as an illustration of an idealized cognitive model:

Let's go to bed now.

Going to bed is typically understood metonymically in the sense of 'going to sleep.' This metonymic target forms part of an idealized script in our culture: when I want to sleep, I first go to bed before I lie down and fall asleep. Our knowledge of this sequence of acts is exploited in metonymy: in referring to the initial act we evoke the whole sequence of acts, in particular the central act of sleeping."
(Günter Radden, "The Ubiquity of Metonymy." Cognitive and Discourse Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, ed. by José Luis Otal Campo, Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando, and Begoña Bellés Fortuño. Universitat Jaume, 2005)

Lexis

 

This part of KAL tests candidates’ knowledge of different types of meaning; sense relations; word formation; lexical units; lexicogrammar and register.

 

Possible testing focus

• types of meaning: denotation, connotation, figurative, contextual e.g. situational, collocational

• sense relationships: synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, whole/part, lexical sets, false friends

• word formation: morphemes, affixation, compounds, types of abbreviations, acronyms, spelling rules, word families

• lexical units: collocations, idioms, fixed phrases, formulaic phrases

• lexico-grammatical features: grammatical function of words and morphemes

• register: domain-specific vocabulary; degrees of formality in vocabulary and their contexts of occurrence