to BYOD or to BYOB, that is the question - Thursday 11th July

Today we have dealt with two very important issues in language learning: vocabulary activities and how to deal with special learning differences in Language Learning.

When it comes to vocabulary, my teaching approach veers to the null as I tend to assign vocabulary activities as homework and just check the lesson afterward if the exercises was carried out well.

When we want to introduce new items of vocabulary we should follow the 5 principles below to make sure these items may easily pass from the short term memory into the long term one, that is they may linger in the learner's brain for more than 30 seconds and become part of their vocabulary. ;) btw, a new word must be repeated 7 times at least before it's memorised.

Vocabulary practice is mandatory to give learners a chance to make language their own, and to acquire the items of language to master them fully. Learning is not a linear process, it's rather spiralling and organic. Teachers can control what is taught but can't guarantee what is learnt.
Recycling, which is neglected in coursebooks, is a technique to remember and transfer the item from short-term into long-term memory. It can be easily incorporated in any context and gives students a sense of confidence and progression, a sense of achievement.
There are a lot of techniques and activities to recycle language: categorising and grouping, controlled practice activities of target language in form of self assessment or progress test/check; language boxes and wordlists; revisiting language through both listening or reading texts; reviewing items through skills practice activities as discussions, writing, paragraph completion or through narrow reading.
The aim of a vocabulary task should be to raise expectation in the learners and to raise their curiosity, this is why teachers should make them hungry. Students should feel the need for the word and this need shouldn't be satisfied by the teacher's translation but they should be guided through strategies to guess the meaning: chop the word, guess it from the context, relate it to their own language.
A very important step of vocabulary acquisition is personalise and activate: once the word is used to elicit a personal response or to refer to the student's own life and culture, it becomes relevant to the student and is therefore memorised. Teachers should then encourage students to re-use the words in different contexts, to use them for real (it's easier in an English-speaking country, though), to practice with gapped sentences/activities the students may produce and share, to use them in discussions.
Other activities that might help learners remember the new items are rhyming associations, mind-mapping, simply linking the unknown to the known.

Vocabox is a good idea to review and recycle vocabulary and fill up some minutes at the end of the lesson. It's fully flexible as it can be used for any game or categorising activity, for a hot seat session too. A bank of words, a treasure teachers might want to introduce in their lessons and daily routine. To fully understand the Vocabox rationale, please refer to my tutor Johanna Stirling's website.

Read article on how to improve Vocabulary and how students could learn the language we teach them.