Working with Wordlists: Vocabulary Cards

You might remember Michael Hudson's webinar from December on ways of using the fantastic wordlist resources in Focus and Wider World.  As promised, here he is with a follow up post on another activity you can use to get the most out of wordlists.  

If you missed the webinar, you can see it on our Dinternal Education YouTube channel. 

Hello everyone, and a big thanks to Tom for letting me write on the blog again!  Just before the Christmas and New Year holidays, I went through 13 activities for using wordlists to help your students learn and retain vocabulary.  Today I'd like to show you a routine I've developed with students in different countries around the world based on using vocabulary cards in class.

If you watched the webinar, you might remember I mentioned some of my golden rules for teaching, including the advice to never do something yourself that your students can do for you while learning English at the same time.  One way of putting this into practice is to ask your students to start making their own vocabulary cards.

As teachers, we all know how important it is to make sure students are recording new vocabulary in a way that is meaningful and memorable for them.  We also know the importance of recycling new language.  That's why wordlists are such a fantastic resource.   After you've done some work on wordlists, you could start your next lesson with a quick review game such as Brainstorm 3 or Stop the Bus.  You could include categories like words ending in -ly, types of fruit, furtniture, etc or words that can go before 'city'

Do some whole class feedback on the vocabulary after the game is finished and use this to elicit some parts of speech. Depending on the level of your students, use some or all of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, exclamations and articles.   It's also useful to elicit or pre-teach the distinction between a word and a chunk (two or more words which go together, like New Year holidays or put something into practice) here.

You'll need to model the task using a word or phrase that you have recently studied, using the following information on the board.

Word or chunk        ______   ____________

Meaning                   A seminar done on the internet

Example sentence   I watched Michael doing ___  _______ last month. 

Translation              ________________       

Ask students to fill in the gaps (each line is one word).   If you've been reading carefully, you should know that the chunk I'm looking for is a webinar.   The translation of this word is easy, of course, but that's not always the case.  That's why I usually take out translation and add the category 'A good way to remember this'.   Sometimes this might be a simple translation but it could also be a real-life example, for instance.

Now divide your class into teams with two or three students in each.  Give each team three vocabulary cards (you can see an example on the left) and ask them to follow your example.  Remind them to choose words or chunks they've already studied in the lessons and not to write the word or chunk itself!


When the students have finished doing this, give the word cards to another team and ask them to try to complete the cards.  In doing this activity, your students have actually prepared and done their own vocabulary test.  Because it comes from their classmates and not the teachers, they won't all realise this, of course!

At the end of the activity, I collect all the cards and keep them in a drawer or a box.  If you make this a regular routine, your students will soon have prepared a lot of easy review materials for you to use in class.  That means next time you want to try any of the wordlist games I mention in the webinar, you won't need to think of the vocabulary to be tested as your students can select it from the cards and run the whole activity themselves.