Vocabulary develpment

WHY do we need to work with vocabulary?? 

It is soo boring!!

www.flicr.com, Robin Hutton

Every teacher’s nightmare is to have pupils who hate language teaching because it is simply boring. And of course, it is boring, when there is absolutely no context relevance in the teaching and the pupils cannot see the relevance and point of it. That would be a common reaction I would receive from my pupils when teaching vocabulary and assessing in the old fashion way and standard form where they are going to study words and write a definition for the words. I was a young teacher following the textbook, a horrible textbook, I must say.  Vocabulary is important in order do to develop your language skills. I often find that the chosen vocabulary in the text we are working with is not processed properly, and the pupils do not seem to be able to use it in context afterwards.

This activity I presented to a class of 9^th grade pupils. I chose an activity that I find useful when we are working with text and vocabulary. I added a game to it, because after all, my pupils are still kids, or young teenagers who love games. I divided them into groups and had them working in groups. This would give them the opportunity to discuss with peer pupils and to use their oral language.

As a homework before the session, everyone were going to write 5 keywords about the theme. It can be things they know about the theme or things they would like to know about. The theme in this text was Space. The activity has four parts.

1.     Pre-reading activity

2.     Game: “Find pairs”

3.     Read the text.

4.     Write sentences with the chosen words.

Pre-reading

I always find it useful to have some sort of pre-reading activity for my pupils before reading a text, especially for the pupils who struggle with reading and reading comprehension. This will prepare them for the topic and the chances are bigger that they will understand more from the context. In this activity I used a photo where the pupils were supposed to connect words with the correct item or thing on the picture. This activity got them to discuss the topic and the vocabulary, which is an advance for reading comprehension. They also discussed among themselves whether the pronunciation is correct or not.

Games and competition

Who does not love games and competition? After the pre-activity I had laminated cards with words and phrases related to the text. They played the game “Find pairs” with the cards, with a word or phrase in one card and a definition the other one. I was afraid that the game might be childish for 9^th grade pupils, but they liked it, maybe because it was a variation. The cards were placed on the table facing upwards, this to make it less challenging for those who might struggle more than others. Both this activity and the former activity will get pupils to speak the words as well, to pronounce them. Pronunciation is an important part of language acquisition.

Post-reading activity

Before I gave the last task in this activity, everyone was told to read through the text in silence for themselves and then later in group. The last task is to write new sentences with the chosen words in the list, which we will do in the next session. I have not yet assessed them on this activity, but I will give them feedback on the last task which they can edit before they hand in for grading and evaluation.

This activity will make the pupils to recycle the words and to really chew on them, because one thing is certain, the more we chew on a word, the easier it will be to use it in context.

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