Build Up Your English Superpower: Learning vocabulary

How to learn a long meaningless vocabulary list? By writing words and their translations in two columns? No way! Is learning of vocabulary easy, boring or challenging? If it is so, let's make it exciting! Have a look at some ideas for a lesson that may appeal to different types of learners.

First let them involve in small competition to motivate them and make the lesson more enjoyable. Then create opportunities to learn for kinaesthetic students (let them show the meaning with gestures or "bring" the objects they bought), visual learners (ask them to draw pictures and visualize objects in the room), auditory learners (ask them to follow oral instructions) and analytical learners (ask them to put the words in different categories).

Warm-up

Task 1 (analytical learners, group work activity)

Divide students in 4 groups and give them 5 minutes to write down as many food items as they know (ask them to write them in alphabetical order) in the categories provided below. Award the group with the most words with pluses or points and let them choose their opponents for the second round (see Task 3). After you check your vocabulary lists together you may like to extend it using:

FOOD AND DRINKS - thematic dictionary

Vegetables	Fruit	Meat	Dairy	Drinks	Other
Beans Beets Broccoli Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Carrot Cauliflower Celery Cucumber Corn Chive Garlic Lettuce Olives Onions Pepper Parsley Pumpkins Potatoes Radish Spring onions Spinach Tomato Zucchini	Apple Apricot Blueberry Blackberry Banana Cranberry Cherry Grapes Grapefruit Kiwi Lemon Lime Lychee Melon Nectarines Oranges Peach Plums Pomegranate Pineapple Papaya Raspberry Strawberry Watermelon	Roast Chicken Bacon Beef Pork chop Sausage Steak Turkey	Butter Cheese Milk Cream Yoghurt	Beer Coffee Cola Juice Water Champagne Wine Green tea Lemonade	Biscuit Bread Bread roll Burger Candy Cake Cereal Chips Chocolate Crisps Doughnut Eggs Fish Honey Ice cream Jam Mushroom Oil Peanuts Pasta Pizza Rice Sushi Shrimps

Task 2 (visual learners, analytical learners, auditory learners)

Ask students to complete their charts with the words in red (only if they haven’t written them earlier). Make sure that they know their meanings and practice pronunciation. Then ask them to draw small pictures of the words that are new and hard to remember OR/AND ask them to divide the new food items into three categories: food I like, food I dislike and food I’d like to try.

Task 3 Where is it in the classroom? (kinaesthetic learners, visual learners, auditory learners)

When the students are ready with their pictures or divisions tell them that now they have to use their imagination. Tell them that they didn’t go to the English lesson but instead they went shopping. They brought to the classroom the food they bought (all the items in red and any other new food items) and they put them elsewhere in the classroom (on the desk, below the window, under the teacher’s desk etc.). Ask them to remember where they put the items. After a while, ask one of the four groups to ask any other group to bring them the imaginary food items (or say where they are in the classroom). They score points for correct pronunciation of the words while the “asked” group scores points for good memory.

(Details: Let the two groups compete together (Group 1 vs Group 2 and Group 3 vs Group 4). They ask for 5 items each. So that in the end each group can score 10 points. Tell the winners that they won’t get homework.

Task 4 Describing tastes.

Write the names of different kinds of food that have the following tastes:

Bitter
Salty
Sour
Spicy
Umami

Task 5 (analytical learners and visual learners)

How to say that a fruit is no longer fresh? Ask the students to highlight a common structure which appears in the three words. Teach them the meaning of the prefixes un – and over - (e.g. uncooked and overcooked)

Ask the students to draw four pictures of the same fruit that illustrate the following adjectives:

unripe ripe overripe rotten