Teaching Vocabulary, Listening Comprehension, and Reasoning by Means of Analogies

  This paper describes a language teaching technique which uses analogies such as are found on the Miller Analogies Test and makes the claim, based on classroom testing, that students enjoy and learn from the intellectually challenging aspects of working through analogies under the guidance of a teacher. The technique involves the students in vocabulary development, listening comprehension, and reasoning. In order to solve an analogy the students must not only understand each word in the analogy, but more importantly the relationships between the words, thus giving them insights into the semantic network of the target language. Much of the work, that is the decision‐making, is the direct responsibility of the student and thus the technique is in keeping with current, more personalized and humanistic trends in language teaching. Fifteen different kinds of analogies are listed with appropriate suggestions for class presentation.