Frequency word lists

TPRS-teacher Thomas Young, who teaches Spanish, blogged about Frequency words, which led me to Michele Baker’s blog, who also teaches Spanish but she conveniently included a link to COCA’s Word Frequency Lists. This list is useful because it helps me answer a key question: what should I teach (first) Thomas writes: We can now look [...]

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Keeping track

Image via Wikipedia All new vocab goes on the board. I don’t care if everyone in the class understands and recognizes the item except one person; for that one person, it goes on the board (and I’m sure at least one other person is grateful). I very quickly ran out of room on the board, [...]

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Teaching vocab

(Photo by seaworthy on Flickr). I’m looking for vocab teaching activities. I really don’t have time to make many materials, so I’m looking for stuff that’s already out there. I’ve insisted my students buy word-cards. I show them how I want them to use them, in class. I’m going to set a target for them [...]

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Dictionary training

I adapted Rob Waring’s paper “How to get your students to use their dictionaries effectively” (OUP, 2001) and created a worksheet for my university EFL students to help them become more familiar with the various functions and uses (and limitations) of their dictionary. Rob Waring stresses that it is best if all students have the [...]

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Teaching vocab

I’m trying to figure out how to best teach vocab to my uni students.I’ve been playing with the Vocab profiler, and have input the first unit of all the textbooks I’m using, and separated out the 1k words, the 2K, the AWL ones, and the off-list. I also want to give some basic dictionary training, [...]

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Miss one, get three!

I missed Paul Nation in Tokyo the other day, but thanks to sista k, I discovered a link to a TESOL online webcast Nation did recently sista k’s blog Teaching to Learn Japan Action Research, another EFL-er in Japan who is interested in vocabulary learning and teaching, and actually quotes a Question and Answer from [...]

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Too late!

Damn! I missed it. Inspired by reading Paul Nation’s tome on Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, I’ve been surfing the ‘Net and tagging all kinds of goodies with vocabulary and extensivereading. Rob  Waring, who’s made an extensive study of um extensive reading (and  listening) and vocabulary learning. On his page of Word Frequency Lists, he [...]

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