Reflection on Brick and Mortar Words in English
Much of today’s presentation dealt with grasping the concepts of brick and mortar terms that are used throughout types of academic language. One of my teachable subjects is English, and it is extremely important in this subject to be clarifying brick and mortar words to our students. In English, bricks can be thought of as specific vocabulary used in literary analysis, such as genres, literary devices, types of poems, etc.
One of the activities our group of English teacher candidates came up with is a simple definition-matching game (which would also work great for other subjects, so feel free to adopt it). Students can be divided into groups of 3-4 and each is given a sentence or group of sentences on a piece of paper. Our sample sentence was, “In tragedy, conflict is often a theme.” Then, for each brick term (tragedy, conflict, theme) you prepare cards with the definitions written. Students then work in groups to match the brick words with the correct definition card. Groups can have the same or different sentences. As a class you can then go over the answers.
I think this a good way to introduce unfamiliar terms to students in a way that is more engaging than simply reading them off a glossary.
The difficulty arises when teaching mortar terms. In English, these are often linking words within a sentence, such as transitional words and conjunctions. One technique I can think of is to group words by similar meaning. (Ex. to show contrast: however, yet, still. To add on: furthermore, moreover, also.) Another way to clarify the meaning of these words is to try hand gestures as Zwiers (2008) mentions, though these may be unidentifiable to ELLs of other languages and cultures. Indeed, I think many of us would agree that it is the mortar terms that are most difficult to explain.