Often times, students have difficulty attaining new elements of vocabulary. Somehow, you have to trick your brain into storing these new pieces of information. The key is to make sure the new words don’t go into their passive registry, meaning that they know the meaning of the word when they see it, but they don’t use it in conversations. They have to go into their active registry, meaning that the words are being used on a regular basis. This is a list of tricks that helps students learn new words.
1. Make a list with translation
This is one of the most traditional methods. What you do is write down the words and its translation in the native language. This method has been criticized by teachers, because it hinders the developmental process. When speaking or writing, the student find himself thinking in his native language and making parallels with the English language in order to express himself. However, this can be avoided with lots of practice and audio-video incentive, such as movies, TV shows, documentaries. It remains one of the most popular methods of teaching a new language.
2. Make a mind map
This method is a great way of presenting a vocabulary set, such as: the days of the week, the months of the year, the seasons, colors and so forth. It is most efficient when you plan the outline beforehand and ask the students to help you complete the empty spaces. There are computer tools that make good mind maps, such as www.text2mindmap.com. This is particularly helpful if you use colors (for smaller students) or for people with a photographic memory.
3. Write the words in a sentence
A good way to attain new vocabulary is to contextualize. After presenting a new word, ask the students to form sentences with that word. The more creative and distinctive the sentence is, the more chance the children have of remembering the word. For people that lack creativity a good option would be to make personalized sentences, that would be much easier to remember.
4. Record the words in phrases or collocations
According to the new develompents in linguistics and teaching, words do not exist in and of themselves. It is best to get the students used to the word with frequent collocates and common phrases. The teacher can set the example by including useful and frequent phrases with new words as they come up and writing these on the board.
5. Make a story including the words
This option is useful for higher level students. It makes the words more memorable, but can present difficulties for people who lack creativity. An alternative for this would be a collaborative story done by a group of students. This method is also known as the story method.
6. Do a drawing or some kind of memory trigger
This is great for artistic students. You could make a “gallery of new words” section of the class wall or bulletin board. Another memory trigger could be based on a translation. Here is one example: The word for Spanish is arroz. Imagine a hail of arrows flying towards your bowl of rice.
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