![]() As an alternative, you can designate an official speaker for each group. Since students work in groups and anyone in the class can call out an answer, the stakes are very low. Once the correct answer is provided, I hold up the card for everyone to see. This is a more complex exercise than it may seem: Students need to use their background knowledge and their listening skills as they recall fairly complex content and mobilize their lexical knowledge, and they have to use the target language when conferring in their groups. Source retelling: I summarize out loud ideas from a source text we’ve covered in class, leaving out keywords that students, working in groups, need to guess. Still, it’s valuable to keep a certain amount of unchallenging terms because they’re reminders of what students know and they help keep all students engaged. As the year goes on, the deck grows and is gradually purged of words that my students and I deem too easy. I write each word on a four-by-six-inch index card in large enough letters to be read from all the way across the classroom. They need to select and learn vocabulary that will be useful for them to do their work in the target culture. Sometimes the terms are specific to a certain field for these words, I try to involve students by asking them to imagine they are specialists in that field (biology, technology, art, etc.) about to travel to a country where the target language is spoken. The items I select are often associated with formal contexts, and they may appear frequently in the authentic materials students deal with in class, regardless of the topic-terms such as to carry out, achievement, scarce, on average, and findings. I add only five to eight terms at a time-early in a course there may be more new words than that in a single text, but emphasizing too many new terms at once may overwhelm most learners. In each print or audio text we cover in my classes, I select several keywords that are important for students to know. The following activities allow teachers to promote students’ vocabulary acquisition naturally by consistently drawing on different language skills-listening, speaking, reading, and writing-at the same time. A deck is an easy-to-create resource that can be exploited in numerous ways with minimal preparation. ![]() The problem becomes even more serious when we consider that for vocabulary instruction to be effective it needs to be not just explicit and engaging but frequent-which means running up against those time constraints repeatedly.ĭeveloping a vocabulary deck can be a great way to keep a growing number of terms in learners’ lexical repertoire. Given the time constraints students face and the virtually endless number of relevant lexical items, teachers often struggle to integrate vocabulary-developing activities into their daily practice. The wide scope of topics typically covered in intermediate to high-level world language classes requires students to master a lot of meaningful new terms.
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