Financial Word Building

Aim:

To reinforce students’ knowledge of word building and typical affixes

Target Audience:

Teachers and students

Relevance to ICFE:

Part 3

Organisation:

Groups of 3 or 4 students

Materials needed:

1 copy per group of the list of stem words; 1 copy per student of the list of frequently occurring affixes; 1 copy per student of source text.
Ideally, students should also have access to a good monolingual advanced learner’s dictionary and/or a dictionary of finance.
  1. Find a suitable financial text containing ten vocabulary items with affixes shown on the ‘Frequently occurring affixes’ list.

  2. Remove the affixes to obtain 10 stem words.

  3. Write a list of stem words on the board, and hand out the list of ‘Frequently occurring affixes’.

  4. Give each group time to produce words by combining affixes and stem words.

  5. Give each student a copy of the source text. Tell them to scan the text to locate original items in context.

  6. Check that students have formed the vocabulary items that appeared in the source text.

  7. Discuss any other words the students have formed that don’t appear in the source text. Do these words have a particular meaning when used in a financial context?

  8. Discuss (very briefly) what the context might be, and how each word could be used in a sentence.

Frequently occurring affixes
Suffixes to form nouns
-age / -er / -or / -ist / -ee / -y /-ity / -ness / -tion / -ation / -ication / -ment / -ship / -ure

Prefixes to form verbs
mis- / dis- /  un- / re- / pre- / post- / sub- / over- / out-/ under- / with-

Suffixes to form verbs
-ify / -ise

Prefixes to form adjectives
im- / il- / ir- / in- / un- / dis-

Suffixes to form adjectives
-al / -ive / -ful / -less / -able / -ible / -ous / -ent / -ate / -ory / -ary / -ed