Top Five Recycling Activities

The variety of topics in commercial English learning textbooks provide learners with a large number of new vocabulary items on different subjects. However, since most coursebooks jump from one unit to another in a relatively short time, learners don't have adequate time to practice the items they have encountered and retain them in long-term memory. Learners need to encounter the new words, phrases, and chunks several times to be able to remember and use them appropriately. 
To overcome the problem of forgetting words quickly, English teachers are recommended to conduct recycling activities that ensure working on previously taught vocabulary over a number of sessions. I often include a recycling activity in my lessons as a warmer, time filler, or end-of-lesson activity. Warmers and time-fillers are best to be related to previous lessons to give learners the chance to work on the same language items in different contexts. My students often appreciate and enjoy any recycling activity that has a game-like feature. End-of-lesson recycling activities usually relieve tension after some serious work during the lesson.. 

Here are my top five recycling activities that you may find in ELT books with different variations.

Taboo: Prepare a list of vocabulary items you want to review. Put students into groups of four and give them a set of cards with a previously learned word on each. Below each target word, there are usually three taboo words the person who has the card can't use. Instruct students to put the pile of cards face down. One student takes a card and defines the target word to the rest of the group. The other students should guess the word on the card to win it. If no one guesses the word, the card goes to the bottom of the pile. Students take it in turns to pick up a card and define the word. The one with the most cards wins at the end. See here a set of taboo cards for intermediate level learners. With low-level students remove the taboo words or only include one and have students use whatever words they know to define the target word. Click here to get a set of taboo game cards for elementary. 

You should provide students with useful language for the game such as:

It’s something that you use to…

It’s someone who …

It’s an adjective, noun, verb, adverb, etc.

It’s the opposite of … /similar to

Playing taboo recycles vocabulary items and engages students in using their language skills to negotiate meanings of words. Yet, the game doesn’t test if students can use the target words in correct sentences. for this reason, I have students put the cards face down again on the table. Now each student takes a card and has 30 seconds to form a statement using the word on the card. The other students decide if the sentence is correct or not and if they are in doubt, they can consult with the teacher. If the sentence is incorrect, the card goes to the bottom of the pile and another student takes a new card. Again, the one with the most cards wins. if time doesn't allow, students could do either activity. 

Anagrams: An effective and easy activity that involves cognitive work is anagrams. It is a game-like activity, in which students unscramble words from randomly written letters. Write a list of vocabulary items for revision on the board with their letters in jumbled order (such as utelerc, nrasmei – for lecture, seminar). Get students work in pairs to unscramble the anagrams. The pairs who finishes first wins, and they are asked to come up to the board to write the words for the others to check the correct spelling. You can involve students with more productive tasks using anagrams; Click here to read more about it. 

Hot seat: it is a guess game similar to taboo but done with the whole class. Divide the class into two or three groups. Have one student from each group come and sit with his/her back to the board. Write a word on the board for the teams who have to define, explain, or give synonyms/ antonyms of the word to the students in front to guess. The student (facing the teams) who guesses first gets his/ her team a point. Next, those students go back to their seats and other two students (depending on the number of teams) come to sit in the front with their backs to the board. Continue the activity until each student in each team has a turn to sit in the front and try to guess a word. The team with the most points wins.

Bingo: A simple, fun game that involves all my students for the sense of completion it has is Bingo. It’s also one of the easiest activities to set. Write a list of 16-17 words to review on the board. Have students draw a grid with nine squares. Then they choose nine words from the list and write them in the squares.

Tell your students that you are going to give definitions of nine words from the list. Each time a student thinks you have given a definition of a word in his/her grid, he/she crosses it out. The one who crosses out all the nine words first shouts BINGO and wins. Once the game is over, you may want to facilitate a productive task using the words on the board. Get students write about five sentences using words from the list. Next they exchange the sentences with their partners to check and give feedback on the language and content. 

Find someone who: This mingle activity could be used to practice or review any

vocabulary or grammar items. Prepare 12 to 15 statements using vocabulary or concepts that relate to your previous unit of study. For example, if you taught a unit on technology, prepare statements such as the following:

Find someone who

…uses social media networks for more than three hours a day.                            

… has used online banking recently.

…plays online games.

…writes on a blog.

Announce that students will ask each other questions. Instruct students to find others who can answer their questions with “yes”. They should write a different name next to each statement. Pass out the worksheet and elicit the correct question form for each statement on the list. Now students mingle around the class asking their peers and write that person’s name on their checklist sheet and go on to the next question with another person. A student can write a person’s name only twice. Encourage students to ask follow-up questions for each statement to make the activity more conversational. If you have only one student, change the phrase "find someone who" to "remember someone who".
 

Do you use any other interesting recycling activities? Share your ideas with us. 

Guidelines for Teaching Vocabulary

A large number of words, phrases, and chunks are acquired incidentally via reading and/or listening to stories, articles, and news items out of class. Similarly, many words are learned from textbooks, teachers, and classmates. In this post, I will shed light on how vocabulary is usually presented and taught in class. 

Presentation

Commercial textbooks usually use different techniques to present new vocabulary. Context-based vocabulary lessons are the most common method for presenting vocabulary. Materials writers most often integrate teaching receptive skills with teaching vocabulary.  You can notice that most reading and listening texts contain subskills exercises such as gist and comprehension questions followed by grammar or vocabulary work. The reason is that presenting vocabulary through a reading or listening text is more engaging and logical for learners to grasp the new items.

Another common way of presenting vocabulary is through lexical-theme lists. Some coursebooks include a vocabulary reference at the end of the book with many vocabulary items along with their pictures (similar to a picture dictionary). The downside of this approach is that learners get overwhelmed by learning too many words out of context within a short time and little practice. 

A third way of presenting vocabulary is called “situational presentation”. In this method, the teacher uses a picture to build a story around, feeding in the vocabulary she intends to teach. It is sometimes time-consuming, but the effect it has on students is worthwhile, especially if the teacher has personalized the story or dialogue.  You can narrate a story about your last holiday to teach words and collocations such as package holiday, sunbathe, go sightseeing, four-star hotel, make a reservation, etc. Tell your story to the learners twice, let them ask some questions, and then give them the script and ask them to underline the words and phrases (hyponyms) related to the superordinate word “holiday”. Put students in pairs and ask them to work out the new vocabulary items from context. 

Clarification

The presentation stage of any kind must be followed by clarification and practice stages to enable learners to learn, remember, and prepare for using the new vocabulary productively and correctly. Teachers should choose seven to eight key items from the text to clarify their meaning, form, word class, and pronunciation. They are also advised to teach these words in context. But there are times when they need to write these words in isolation to highlight a certain linguistic feature such as stress. In reading texts, students see the form of a new word before they get the meaning, and that allows them to make guesses about it from the co-text and context, which is an important sub-skill they always need in real life. 

On the other hand, students are introduced to the sounds of the new items in listening texts before meaning. In this case, they need to use their general knowledge about the subject (schemata) and their bottom-up (linguistic) knowledge as well to get the meaning. In any case, meaning must be established and clarified as soon as possible for learners wouldn’t be able to connect the new lexis with other words they know and store them in their memory unless they get their meanings. the teacher could use a variety of modes for conveying the meaning of a vocabulary item, such as giving a definition, using a gesture, cline, example sentence, picture, synonym or antonym, etc. Using one or a combination of these techniques depends on the word at hand. For instance, an effective way to explain the word “mild” is to write a sentence example and put it on a cline: It’s mild today; let’s have a walk (boiling -hot - mild - cold -  freezing). Having conveyed the meaning, the teacher is advised to use concept checking questions (CCQs) to check if the learners have got the correct meaning. 

When pinpointing the form of a lexeme, a teacher should consider the word class (whether the word is a noun, verb, adjective, etc.) and spelling, especially if it is at odds with its pronunciation. Teaching other words within the same word family would be appropriate at this stage. For instance, it is easy for a student to learn the word “anger” if he has learned ‘angry”. Pronunciation comes next; the teacher drills the lexis chorally and individually indicating the correct place of stress. For more details on what aspects of a word a teacher should teach, and examples for using CCQs and anticipated problems, click here.

Practice

So far there is no guarantee that learns are able to use the words at hand productively. In other words, they are still passive. We need to put the word to work. The mainly teacher-centered clarification stage must be followed by student-centered production activities. New vocabulary items should occur in different exercises which cognitively engage the learners. Learners need to do some controlled practice such as identifying, matching, gap-fills, sentence completion, grouping words in categories. The practice such exercises provide helps students get the new items round their minds. The more students make decisions about words the more they remember them (Thornbury, 2002).

Production

Having done some of the above controlled-practice exercises, students should be ready for freer production activities, in which they use the target language in speaking or writing activities. If learners have learned shopping words and phrases such as get a refund, exchange, on sale, etc., the teacher can set a role-play where student A is the shop assistant and student B is a customer. If students have practiced holiday vocabulary such as sunbathe, go sightseeing, take photos, they can practice these items in speaking or writing about their last holiday. 

Production activities should be guided by the teacher with simple instructions and/or demonstration so as students know exactly what is required from them. A good production exercise is the one that asks learners to personalize the target language to talk about themselves or someone they know. Production exercises should be similar to real-life discourse when learners use the language to communicate with others. The class is a great place to prepare students for real-world communication. Hence, the time allocated for controlled practice and freer production tasks must be much longer than the time allotted to the presentation stage. 

While students are conducting the production activities, the teacher is recommended to take notes of good language use and common errors from the students' practice for a delayed error correction stage. After the learners have finished the speaking or writing activity, she writes the notes on the board and has the students mark the sentences correct and incorrect. Then she praises them for the correct use of the new items and gives them a time limit to correct the mistakes in the wrong sentences. 

Even students have done enough practice in one session, they are still prone to forget the new items in a short time if they haven’t encountered/revised the vocabulary again. Recycling activities must be taken into great consideration for they enable students to store the items in long-term memory. You could start or end your lesson with a short recycling activity. And make sure you distribute the vocabulary over a number of recycling activities in different sessions (Thornbury, 2002). Click here for a list of my top five recycling activities. 

If you have any interesting ideas on teaching vocabulary, please share them with us in the comment box below.  

Thornbury, S. (2002). How to teach vocabulary. England: Pearson Education Limited

Using Anagrams for Recycling Vocabulary

An effective and easy recycling activity that involves cognitive work is anagrams. It is a game-like activity, in which students form words from randomly written letters. Choose 10 to 12 vocabulary items from previous lessons and write them on the board with their letters in the wrong order (such as utelerc, nrasmei – for lecture, seminar). Get students work in pairs to unscramble the anagrams. The first pairs who finishes wins, and they are asked to come up to the board to write the words for the others to check the correct spelling. 

Reviewing words in isolation is of little effect on communication. It is better to connect the target words with other words to form phrases or chunks which are more easily stored in the memory and more important for communicating fluently. So, if the list of words is about sports, ask students to write the verb that occurs with each sport. Or if the list is about shopping items, ask students to write an appropriate adjective/verb/ article adjacent to each word. Allocate 3-4 minutes for this task. Students can complete this task individually or in pairs. Next, they compare their lists with new partners/pairs before you nominate different individuals to come to the board and write their lists. Other students can add different collocations too. 

An addition task to exploit the words and to engage the students in a production task is to have them write a short story or dialogue which includes at least seven words/phrases from the list. This production activity offers a great practicing opportunity of the target language. Set a time limit of 10-12 minutes to conduct this task. Students work individually or in pairs while you circulate and monitor. Once students have finished, they exchange their papers, read and edit their partner’s work. Finally, nominate a few students to read aloud their stories to the class.

An alternative activity to the story task is to ask students to write five sentences, each of which contains a word or phrase from the list. Alternatively, they can write five questions using a phrase in each to ask their partners.

Any of the above recycling activities can be executed individually according to the time available for recycling exercises.