Categories and associations can help students to remember words. Here are some ideas.
CategoriesPut the students into small groups, give them a list of words and ask them to put them into categories. You can tell them the categories or ask them to come up with them. You can have words from one lexical set or different lexical sets.
Random Associations
Put two lists of words on the board from two different lexical sets. Ask students to make associations between words from each set. Liver - France etc.
Odd one out
Give students groups of 4 words and ask them to decide what the odd one out is. You can make this obvious or more thought provoking.)
Picture associations. Ask students to link words to a picture. I used fish.
games are easy to set up and provide a fun way to recycle vocabulary.
Back to the boards
One student sees a word the other doesn’t. Then –
- the students who sees the words describes it so the other one can guess.
- the student who sees the word draws it so the other one can guess.
- the student who sees the word acts it so the other one can guess.
- the student who doesn’t sees the word asks yes or no questions to try to guess the word.
One student sees a word the other doesn’t. Then –
- the students who sees the words describes it so the other one can guess.
- the student who sees the word draws it so the other one can guess.
- the student who sees the word acts it so the other one can guess.
- the student who doesn’t sees the word asks yes or no questions to try to guess the word.
With or without dictionaries.
Ask students to use dictionaries, or their common sense to find collocations, word stress and prefixes / suffixes.
English in the Environment.
For homework ask students to look out for English they see around their own city. Ask them to write them down.
Or ask them to look for words that are English like but have different spelling.
Or ask them to look for words that are English like but have different meanings. (False friends).
