Practising words

It is very unusual for students to remember a word if they met it only once. In fact researchers have shown that 80% of what we hear is forgotten after 24 hours. So, in

order to help students to remember words the teacher should practice and recycle them regularly. Coursebooks are rather weak at recycling words; once they have been introduced they are often never seen again. It is the teacher’s responsibility to make sure that the high frequency words get revised until they are thoroughly learnt.

Although the number of times the students see and use the word will affect how well they remember it, there is also a qualitative side of learning. Students need to be challenged to think about the word and to link it with other words that they already know.

To summarise, students need meaningful repetition if they are to remember words.

Preparation

1. Choose some words you need to practise / revise (target words).

2. For each target word, think of three or four words that the students already know and which are associated with this word in some way (clues). For example:

Target words	house	pour	magazine
Clues	stone	water	buy
	sleep	glass	pictures
	eat	waiter	read
	building	serve	articles

Procedure

• Teacher explains to the student that they have to guess the target word from the clue words that will be given

• Teacher says the first clue and writes it on the board

• The students try to guess the target word. They are not allowed to ask questions because we want them to produce as many words as possible

• As students shout out the words the teacher writes them on the blackboard

• If they cannot guess the target word the teacher gives the second clue, etc. Don’t give the clues too quickly – you want to get a lot of words from the students

• At the end you will have on the board a list of words associated with the target word

Procedure

Bingo! can be played in many ways. The simplest way is:

1. The teacher writes a list of 10 word on the blackboard

2. The students choose 5 of the words and write them down

3. The teacher reads out the words in any order

4. If the students have the word on their list, they put a tick next to that word

5. When a student has ticks against all five words, he shouts BINGO!

If you play Bingo! this way, it is not very difficult. The students only have to listen and read; they do not have to understand the meaning of the word. You can make the game more challenging by giving in Step 3 above:

What to do instead of Step 3	Target word	Teacher says
The opposite of the word	expensive	The opposite of cheap
A synonym of the word	small	Means the same as little
A definition	envelope	We put letters in it
A word that rhymes	garden	Rhymes with ‘pardon’
A translation	language	язык
A characteristic	elephant	It has a trunk
Jumbled letters	decide	The word has two Es, two Ds, a C and I
Another grammatical form	sting	The past tense is ‘stung’
Real object	bag	(shows a bag)
action	write	(does action)