Teaching Vocabulary

    I cannot imagine how many words there are in English. Furthermore, everyday there is a new list which appears in the language. Personally, I would count how many of them I know; one day I will do it. I hope so. Ok, let’s stop beating around the bush. How to teach vocabulary? In my humble opinion, I think we ought to teach students how to ask for words they don’t know or how to ask for the meaning of words they don’t understand. So, the next questions can take part in these situations:

How do you say _____ in English? What’s the word for____ in English? What does ____ mean?

   As you can see these questions appear in special context where the words are used. Thus, students can remember them better and see how they (words) are used.

Other strategy to make students memorize or remember vocabulary is playing games. Here are two examples:

Art Gallery: This is a great activity for reviewing vocabulary.  Draw enough squares on the board for each Student to be able to draw in.  Have the Students write their names above their squares.  Teacher calls out a word and the Ss draw it (could be simple nouns e.g. "dog, bookcase, train", verb structures e.g. "draw a man running, eating cake, sleeping") or adjectives ("draw a big elephant, an angry lion, an expensive diamond ring").  For each Student give a score for his/her picture, and then move on to the next picture.  The Student with the highest score at the end is the winner.

Pictionary: Good for reviewing vocabulary.  Pick a Student and show him/her a picture or whisper a word into his/her ear.  The Student draws the picture on the board and the first Student to guess the picture gets to draw the next picture.  This can also be played in teams with a point system.

   

    To sum up, these are two important strategies we can use to teach vocabulary in a classroom (with questions and games). Students will learn a lot when we use the new vocabulary in the right context. Additionally, we should use different ways to present vocabulary including pictures, sounds, and  different text types with which students can identify: stories, conversations, new reports, etc.

It's a very interesting video where the guy teach us how to teach new vocabulary.

A Grammar Activity

     Before we see our grammar activity I think we ought to check, at least, one concept about grammar.  I found an interesting meaning of Grammar, here is it: “The set of rules that describe the structure of a language and control the way that sentences are formed” (McMillan Dictionary). Well, many students of English language shock when they hear the word “grammar”. It happened to me and my friends when we had to deal with rules, structures, exceptions, etc. There were a lot of teachers who made a great job teaching this relevant part of English when I was a beginner student of English, but let’s face it there were some who only fill the board with tables, structures, etc which made students get bored. I think most students do not want to know all the rules; they’d like only to speak, write, listen and read.  So, we should teach grammar in simple and fun ways. That’s why we have a grammar activity in order students enjoy grammar in class. In this case we are going to see an activity which helps us to teach PAST PERFECT TENSE.

Here are the steps:

•       Tell students one day before they have to bring biographies of authors, inventors, and famous people who passed away.

•      Make students create a timeline so they can use the past perfect tense; for example, when Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPod, he had kept the idea for 20 years earlier.    

•       Give a lot of examples so that they can familiarize with the structure, not telling them directly. Besides, make sure they understand you are talking about two events that took place in the past, but one before the other, then, have students produce examples of their own biographies using the timeline.

•      Once they are comfortable with past perfect in affirmative and negative sentences, move on to examples with questions; then make them ask each other questions that personalize the student with the person they are talking about: When Steve Jobs invented the iPad, had you heard about its inventor?

A Biography

     Okay, we saw a grammar activity that can help us to teach Past Perfect Tense.  One consideration we should keep in mind: Have everything ready before students enter the classroom. As always, not every student will bring the material we asked them before so we should be prepared for them bringing extra material.

     I think this is a great activity for teaching Past Perfect tense. According to the purpose of the lesson we should identify what it is, then prepare an activity which help us to arrange it.