Vocabulary

Fecha de publicación: 06-jun-2011 11:30:59

Some questions to have in mind when helping students develop their English vocabulary:

- What words to choose (attending to communicative, frequency, semantic, morphological, phonetic... criteria?)

- How to present them?

* Relating new words to vocabulary already known by students, eg. eliciting known vocabulary with or without the aid of images.

* Using flashcards or other visual cues. Some resources on the Net: Free ESL flashcards, Semanda, CEFIRE de Elda...

* Using graphic organizers.

- What techniques to use and useful ICT tools:

* Word lists and glossaries. Word processors, GoogleDocs, wikis...

* Cards. Photographs, picture editors such as Picasa, Paint...

* Posters. Glogster (an example of glog). Anglès 365 Vocabulary

* Slide presentations. Farm animals.

* Word identification from oral and written texts (storytelling and non-fiction texts, readers, multimedia texts...)

* Identification and association exercises and games. Exercises for revising vocabulary (matching, pelmanism, hangman...), Galaxy 1,

* Guessing games or exercises to link words to definitions. Months of the year, Choose a word

* Activities for presenting and memorizing vocabulary. Learning Chocolate. English Vocabulary Quizzes.

* Memorizing songs and poems. Old MacDonald.

* Translation. Atantot

* Games based on spelling such as Wordsearches

- How to assess progress:

* Tests and exercises focused on words.

* Use of vocabulary in context: integrated in oral or written productions through more or less communicative activities (gap-filling exercises, creative writing using given words, ...).

A collection of exercises: Many Things

An interesting paper on Teaching Vocabulary to Primary Children.