 |
| 11th graders discuss The Screwtape Letters--themes, satire, and vocabulary. |
Yesterday in English 10, I saw students in animated discussion of words, asking each other, “What is hamper if it isn’t a dirty clothes hamper?”, analyzing prefixes and roots, admitting, “I don’t know what subsidize means,” and offering, “When I hear the word clutch, I think of a clutch play,” while others made grabbing motions with their fingers. (I threw in “There’s also the type of purse and the part of a manual transmission. How do you think they’re related?”)
Last week I wrote about the best 15-minute investment I’ve made in teaching my students writing. Today I’ll share the best 10-minute investment in teaching vocabulary.
I collect vocabulary words from the reading we’ll be doing in a given unit and include the list in the unit outline the students receive when we start. As a preview, I ask students to look over the list and mark each word with a plus, circle, or minus. The plus means you know that word. The minus means you have no idea what it means. The circle can mean anything in between—something like you feel you’d know it in context, though you couldn’t give a definition cold, and it's definitely not in your productive vocabulary.
When they’ve done that, they ask their table groups about their unknown words to see if any of the other three students can help them. At the end, I ask if there are any words that no one had known. Yesterday ineluctable was the only and unanimous vote. So we talked about that one word briefly as a class—its definition and the context sentence we would find it in. Then we moved on to the reading.
But with that 10-minute exercise, students not only previewed the vocabulary list, they also became a little more familiar with the words they talked about, and now they are primed to notice those words when we come across them in the reading. And I didn’t even have to create a pre-test!
What’s an efficient vocabulary learning strategy you’ve used with your students?
No comments:
Post a Comment