Want some thoughts and resources for teaching vocabulary?

Back at you from the UK this week. I'll be here for about a month before the IATEFL conference in April and I'm looking forward to it. Are you going? I'm giving a talk that I've called 'Making money from educational video; 12 lessons from 12 years'. You'll be hearing more about that in the run-up to the conference, trust me.....

BUT...enough of that for now- lots for you today with a theme of Teaching Vocabulary. Buckle up- here we go...

Something old

If you're in the early stages of your career as an English teacher, you might not have really thought about just how complicated vocabulary can be. You've got a word in the coursebook and you're supposed to teach it, so you elicit the meaning and check they understand and Bob's your uncle. Done....

Except that when your learners try to use that word they get into all sorts of problems because you forgot to mention to them that it's got an irregular plural form, or it doesn't collocate with that verb, or the sound and the spelling don't match very well... Sound familiar?

This video is one of my longer ones (almost 15 mins- hope that doesn't put you off!). But I think it's an interesting journey though some of the main issues of Meaning, Form and Pronunciation that you need to be aware of when you're teaching vocabulary. See what you think and let me know if you can think of any others.

Something new

I know you're going to like my new video this week- I've been looking forward to sharing it with you. It's about Quizlet.

Now, before you think 'Oh yeah- been using that for years- nice tool but nothing new' and skim on... wait up! I would have thought that too, until recently. Quizlet is a tool that's been kicking around for a long time and it's always been incredibly useful with the ability to make online flashcards complete with definitions, images, translations and pronunciation and share them with learners really easily.

Ok, the bad news is that the free options are now more limited than they used to be (although there's still a lot you can use without any payment). But the GOOD NEWS is that with AI technology, it has some AMAZING new features. Definitely worth checking out. Watch the video to see what they are!

Something borrowed

Finally, it's hard to talk about vocabulary without mentioning Michael Lewis' Lexical Approach. If you haven't come across this before (it's not new- the book was originally published over 30 years ago- but it seems to have gone out of the spotlight recently) you might find this introductory article on it from the British Council website interesting. It's a short read, I promise!

If you like this and feel that you could put more emphasis on vocabulary in your lessons, a really useful and FREE resource is Hugh Dellar's Lexical Lab site. He's got a lot of interesting things on there but what I particularly like is the wide range of texts he's got (some with exercises) that put a useful lexis into natural contexts. There's Chunk of the Day, Intermediate Word of the Day, Phrase of the Day and Word of the Day. It's mainly for higher level learners but you could always adapt the texts and reduce the amount of vocabulary to make things more appropriate for lower levels too. See if you can find something in there to use in one of your lessons next week.

OK- that's the lot for this week. Hope you have a good one and I'll see you next Sunday.

Best

PS. You can view all my resources for CELTA here and for teachers here.