Vocabulary Learning

This blog will hopefully inspire other teachers in regards to vocabulary learning. I have tried out a few different methods in class and I will give you an insight into what I did and how it turned out. Teachers have a range of vocabulary activities, this is also the case for me. However, I often tend to use the same methods and therefore I wanted to conduct some new activities in class and to see how they responded. 

Things to consider before planning the activity.

I chose my smallest class at school to become my guinea pigs for this vocabulary activity. There are only seven pupils in this class and we meet up twice a week. The subject is Engelsk Fordypning so they have all elected this course and I know they all want to improve their English. They all seem quite motivated in developing their English skills and I also see that they need much support from me, as every pupil does off course. The reason why some of my pupils chose English over Spanish or German was that they felt they needed more English and struggled with the language to begin with. Up until now, I have focused the most on speaking skills, trying to make them feel confident within the group. There is nowhere to hide in a small group...

The actual planning:

The topic of the month is called Down your Spine. The pupils will be exposed to scary stories, learning about Halloween and other frightening creatures such as ghosts among some. The pupils will later plan a small project in connection to this topic, but before they do, we must focus on new words.

Since it is the Halloween season, I wanted my pupils to learn about this tradition. 

I wanted my pupils to learn some new words in relation to this topic, so my focus was on lexical words.  All the words for the exercise were nouns and connected to the subject of Down your Spine. 

The targeted words were; gnome, vampire, bat, spirit, spider, giant, snake, pumpkin, devil, witch, farmer, ghost. 

I chose words that I think are important in order to discuss aspects of the topic later on. The targeted words are also linked to a text about Halloween which we are planning on reading in following week. I also didn’t want to work with too many words.

A description of the activities:

I put all the words in a table and gave the pupils a print. See below:

Gnome	Spider	Devil
Vampire	Giant	Witch
bat	snake	farmer
spirit	pumpkin	Ghost

I asked the pupils to study the table with all the words for a minute before the next instruction. Then I showed a picture of some of the words and asked the pupils to tick the box with the word they thought matched the picture.  You can see the pictures I showed them below. I have minimized them so they wouldn’t take up so much space on my blog, but the pictures were full size during the activity. 

 

        

                                                               

All my pupils, but two, managed to find the correct match for the pictures. Two of my pupils didn't tick vampire and bat. Afterwards, I showed them the key. Then we repeated the words aloud together along with the images, not the written words. We didn’t need to find the equivalent word in Norwegian because the images were there instead. I chose pictures to activate their visual skills. The only picture that needed some more explanation was the vampire picture. I wanted to make sure they understood the concept of this particular word.

The pupils repeated the words aloud many times. After that, I only showed the image and they were supposed to say the word. This went quite well. Everybody participated. The pupils repeated the words 6-7 times aloud.

After this activity, we studied the other words in the table. gnome, bat, spirit, giant, snake, devil, farmer, ghost. The pupils found the equivalent words in Norwegian and we also found pictures online. We studied the spelling of the words and worked on the pronunciation together. The one word that needed some explaining was the word spirit. This noun is not easy to find a picture of (neither is ghost, but we do have cartoon images of it) so it needed some explanation.

The odd one out 

After the introduction of the words and the warm up activity, we continued to work with the same words but in another setting. I wanted them to retrieve the words and have small discussions using the words in sentences and conversations. We used the same words in the table, but this time I asked them to pick the odd one out.

Most of the pupils had the same word ticked off, but we also had some interesting discussions. The pupils had to explain the reason for their choices.

 My reflections on the vocabulary activities

The targeted words may have been a part of the pupils' receptive vocabulary already, but throughout the lesson they were forced to use the words actively and hopefully may become a part of their productive vocabulary. The next FOE lesson, after these activities, I wanted to check if they could retrieve the same words. All seven succeeded in doing this.

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