I've
been thinking about what to write here... I have so many ideas; however, I feel
so small in a world full of brilliant teachers. Still, there are colleagues out
there who come to me for help and suggestions for their various 'class scenarios'.
I guess there might people in the world interested in what goes on inside my
mind then. So I'll finally start this section writing an idea I had on how to
work with incidental vocabulary.
First of all, I should talk about what I have come to find the most brilliant material a teacher can lay hands on: the notes taken during a class. That's right! I take notes on everything my students say: their mistakes and their own corrections, along with the new words that come up. I do that as a way to track what they need to improve and their progress though classes. I intend to write another post about how I developed my own system to teach grammar according to Students' needs shown in classes. For now, let's talk about vocabulary!
In
the end of my classes, I usually have a huge list of vocabulary that came up
during class. Some of it is related to the topic we had been discussing; they
were expected and are probably in the homework planned beforehand. Some of it
might be totally random though. So what can I do with them? How am I going to
have my students practice these new words that they have asked for themselves?
I
usually organize them in an exercise format and post it to a file I share with
my students on Google docs. I think this has been working fine. Most students
do the homework and seem to remember that vocabulary later on. The other day
though, I really thought I wanted to bring those "random" words back
to the following class.
So
here's what I did! In the beginning of the next class, I showed the students
the list of vocabulary and had them either come up with a translation or
explain it. We also briefly talked about how to use them in a sentence. It was
all according to the best approach to the matter as possible. You might need to
take a moment to think about it. If you have studied something related to
teaching a second language or are an experience teacher, you probably know that
sometimes it's just easier to give students the translation of a word right
away rather than spending ten minutes trying to explain it. But sometimes you
can explain it easily and is best for your students to get used to the
explanation in English. Study the list beforehand if you must. Something else I
worked on during the beginning of this class was pronunciation. All very
important when it comes to new words: what they mean, how to use them in a
sentence, and how to pronounce them. Students are more likely to use new
vocabulary once they feel comfortable about all this.
After
this first crucial part of the activity, I moved on to telling them what they
were supposed to do with that list of words. This is the explanation they read
and explained to me with their own words afterwards:
NOW
LET’S PLAY WITH THESE WORDS! YOU WILL HAVE TO TALK ABOUT A SPECIFIC TOPIC.
HOWEVER, THERE ARE SOME CONDITIONS: (1) YOU NEED TO USE ONE WORD FROM THE
VOCABULARY LIST IN EVERY SENTENCE YOU SAY. (2) YOU CAN ONLY SAY ONE SENTENCE AT
A TIME; THEN IT’S YOUR PARTNER’S TURN. (3) LAST BUT NOT LEAST, YOU AND YOUR
PARTNER MUST FOLLOW THE ORDER THE WORDS SHOW ON THE LIST.
The
reason why I had them tell me what they had to do was just to make sure they
really knew what they had to do. Sometimes they don't get it and having them
say it in their own words is a nice way to make sure they know what to do.
Also, it is a nice opportunity to have them speak English for a purpose.
The
list was long, with 23 vocabulary items. They handled it well and we had a lot
of fun! I thought that maybe in a next time I would select the more relevant
words, the ones they really might need in their daily lives. On another
perspective, I could pick the words they have already asked many times and seem
to never memorize, or the ones they mispronounce very often, something like that.
I
hope this was useful! As always, please contact me or leave a comment if you
have something to say about this. Thanks for reading!
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