choosing vocabulary to teach Archives

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Low level activities to revise vocabulary: what to choose

Written by Andrew Walkley on April 25, 2025. Posted in Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Lexis, Teaching lexically, Vocabulary Choice. 4 Comments on Low level activities to revise vocabulary: what to choose

To learn words students need to recall and use them multiple times, so it is good to have activities to revise vocabulary in class. In this post I look at choosing items to revise and what difference low levels makes on this and the tasks we do.Not just vocabularyThe first thing to say is that I think we should encourage students to think that when they revise vocabulary they also revise grammar. This is particularly true at the lowest levels where so many words are what might be described as grammar words and others have a an overall conceptual meaning that allows for a huge number of...

Why teachers shouldn’t prefer blonde

Written by Hugh Dellar on November 5, 2014. Posted in Opinions, Vocabulary Choice. 7 Comments on Why teachers shouldn’t prefer blonde

I recently asked a couple of colleagues which word they thought was more frequent – arise or blonde. Almost immediately, the answer blonde came back. However, despite the confidence of the response, according to the British National Corpus (BNC) and various dictionaries, my colleagues were wrong! Arise is in fact nine times more frequent than blonde in the BNC. There is some evidence to suggest that my colleagues are not alone. Teachers (and students) are not very good at recognising frequency of words (see McCrostie 2007).Examples you can think of, rather than frequencyOne of the...