VOCABULARY – Keeping Track Of Class Vocabulary

/ All levels, Lesson tips, Teachers, Vocabulary training

About a year ago, I started to use QUIZLET to keep track of all vocabulary items we discussed in our lessons and it turned out to be really useful for both, online or face-to-face lessons. Quizlet is a platform where you can create flashcards to help your students memorize lexical items. The site does not send you any marketing mails or newsletters, but the free version has some banners (for all ages) on its pages. So, I set up a simple Teacher account and started to create my sets, one for every course.

The things is very simple: once you have a free account as a Teacher, you can click onto Create, give a name to your set and start typing in the words and their meanings. For lower levels, my sets are bilingual (English-Italian), for higher levels monolingual (word + English definition/explanation).

If sets get too long, it takes a while to reload them and add new items to them, so my suggestion is that you open a new set after about 100 words.

At the end and on the page of every set, you have the possibility to share the set with your students.

This window pops up:

Once the students receive a set (only once, they will have access to all updates made to this set), they can start practising:

They can:
– flip through the cards with the small arrows under them (by clicking on one, it turns around showing the meaning/definition) – FLASHCARDS
– be shown one word and four possible meanings (multiple-choice questions) – LEARN
– practise spelling by typing in the English version for the displayed meanings/definitions – WRITE
– do the same, but after listening to the words (although these are also written for them) – SPELL
– check their knowledge with 20-question tests – TEST.

Also the students have to register the first time they use the program (or download the App). Once they are registered, the platform remembers their scores and make them revise the new or problematic words/expressions.

You can also involve your students and ask them to create a set for a lesson (or the lessons of the week) and this way, also they are responsible for the class wordlists. Ask every week another student to do this. They should share it only with you first, so that you can double-check that everything is correct. Then they can share it with the class. It will be important that you agree on deadlines.

Set clear rules for the format and layout:
– Do you use pictures?
– Do you separate words with a dash or a slash or a comma?
– Do you start sentences with a capital letter? (I’d say: yes.)
– Do you finish a sentence with a dot, a question mark or an exclamation mark? (I’d say: yes.)
– What and how do you abbreviate (something – sth/sg)?
– Do you give details about part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.)?
– How do you distinguish an infinitive verb: with to or in another way? (If you write, for example, work, it can be a noun, too.)
– etc.

These rules are important, because students often lose marks just because they don’t use capital letters (e.g. monday instead of Monday) or they write win, won, won instead of win – won – won.

The easiest way to prepare for these rules is to go through some sets as a student (not yours, you have access to any teachers’ sets, just type something into the search field). You will see what ‘mistakes’ you made and also that most/none of them will be lexical problem (you might come up with a synonym, obviously).

These editable Google Forms help you keep track of the lexical items you’ve already dealt with in your YL course:

Progress Checker Starters – ELT-TUTOR SHOP
Progress Checker Movers – ELT-TUTOR SHOP
Progress Checker Flyers – FREE

Taboo Cards - Flyers

YL Taboo cards following the official Cambridge YLE Wordlists. Ready-to-print, fun activity for vocabulary revision.

Taboo Cards Starters – ELT-TUTOR SHOP
Taboo Cards Movers – ELT-TUTOR SHOP
Taboo Cards Flyers – FREE

Three Editable Exit Tickets for Adult/Teen and YL classes ready-to-be-built into your weekly/monthly routine to get feedback from your students:

Go to the ELT-TUTOR SHOP

Christmas Taboo slides

This is a set of 27 lexical items linked to Christmas from Santa Claus & Christmas tree over bells & angel to Christmas pudding & snowflake. There are two files attached: a Google Slide which you can personalize and a pdf file.

Go to ELT-Tutor Shop

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