Teaching Tips

Teaching Vocabulary

• Students will remember more if you do not teach too many items at one time. So, remember 'little and often' is more effective.
• Arrange your board so that there is a section to one side where you can write up new vocabulary.
• When Students meet new vocabulary it is vital that they know how to say it and how to use it in a sentence. So, make sure that you mark the stress and part of speech on your board record of each new word.
• Encourage Students to notice patterns in new language (eg twenty, thirty, forty; England — English / Finland — Finnish)
• Provide Students with ideas on how to remember new words:
  1. constant recycling and working with exercises in the Vocabulary Pluses, reviews etc.
  2. putting stickers with the word in English on objects at home (e.g., sink.)
  3. putting new vocabulary onto cards. On public transport, test themselves on the meaning and pronunciation and putting the words they can remember into an 'I know this' pocket.
  4. connecting words to pictures, smells, sounds, feelings that they choose themselves.
• Encourage Students to keep vocabulary notebooks. Spend time at the beginning of a course helping Students to
  1. organise them logically (e.g., alphabetically, by topic, grammatically) and leave empty pages so that they can add new words into the categories they have chosen
  2. provide definitions of each (e.g., direct translation, copied from an English-English dictionary, pictures)
  3. include stress and part of speech (e.g., American — adj)
  4. put the new language into an example sentence
  5. include collocations so that the words are not learnt in isolation (e.g., listen to the radio)

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  • Wordlists
  • Teaching tips
  • Placement test
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