The idea of getting students to write sentences with the new vocabulary words is something that is so obvious that I almost feel silly posting it here as if it's a new idea.
And yet, it's something that I haven't been doing for years, and now that I've started doing it again, I'm finding the results are really positive.
I stopped doing this activity because of feedback I got from a former manager after an observation. He told me that just asking students to "make sentences using the vocabulary" was too open ended of a task, and also that it lacked a communicative purpose from the students' end. So for the past 8 years or so, I've avoided this activity.
Recently, however, I had a class of students request that I give them more practice using the vocabulary in sentences. So in order to keep the students happy, I decided to give it a try.
After we study words from a vocabulary set, at the end of class I put students in groups, have them make sentences using the vocabulary, and then have them go up to the whiteboards and whiteboards and write down their sentences. (I'm fortunate enough to teach in classrooms that have multiple whiteboards around the room, so there's plenty of space for students to write. But this activity could also be adapted to having the students write their sentences down on paper.)
I then go around and offer students feedback about their sentences.
I've been finding that it offers a lot of really good opportunities to talk about collocations, register, word grammar, etc, as well as meaning. (There are a lot of aspects to a vocabulary word, and you would never have time to talk about all of them during the initial presentation, but when students are experimenting with using the word it offers a lot of opportunities to give feedback on different aspects.)
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