Tag: English vocabulary

Personal Qualities vocabulary
Personal Qualities vocabulary

In this post, you can learn the vocabulary to describe personal qualities. Here we will try to teach you the following words: sociable, friendly, sensitive, talkative, confident, ambitious, dull, cheerful, easygoing, loyal, honest, worried, modest, shy, sensible, hardworking. These words are quite useful, as you can speak about other people and describe them.
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[showmyads] To learn these words you can use the mind map or the revolutionary method of learning called random repeat. Moreover, you can practise the words in two interactive crosswords, a wordsearch and a sudoku. I hope you will like this post and you will find the words you learn here useful.

Personal Qualities – learn the vocabulary

The first way in which you can learn the words is called Random Repeat. Play the following game. Listen and repeat the words and once the screen turns white, read the definition and click the right word. To make this method more effective, it is a good idea to say the words aloud while you click.

Random repeat – full screen

If you feel that you are a visual learner, then the following mind map might be more useful for you. Study the words, then cover them, read the definitions and try to remember the words.

Personal qualities vocabulary mind map by engames.eu

Full size image

Practise the words

In this part, you can practise the words. The first interactive puzzle is the wordsearch. Your task is to find all the words.

Full screen word search

Crosswords are another way to practise the vocabulary. There are two crosswords here. Can you solve them both? If you fill in a wrong letter, it will be red. Correct letters are black.

Personal Qualities – crossword 1 Personal Qualities – crossword 2

And as there are many sudoku lovers, I have prepared vocabulary sudoku for you, too. Fill in the words loyal, dull, friendly, sociable, shy,
worried, sensible, cheerful and modest
in such a way that each word is just once in every line, every column and in every small square.

If you would like to learn more words, you can try our post on punctuation.
You can learn the food vocabulary here.
You can learn the words connected with health and disease here.

Living Room vocabulary
Living Room vocabulary

Pictionaries are a powerful method of teaching new vocabulary. In pictionaries, you can see the word and its meaning at the same time, and thus it is easier to remember it. Moreover, good pictionaries are appealing and they attract learners to explore them. Therefore, it is a good idea to include them in your lessons.

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Machines and appliances – English vocabulary
Machines and appliances – English vocabulary

Picture dictionaries are very popular among learners of English. In this post, I would like to offer you a pictionary with Machines and appliances. This post contains an infographic and a crossword. I hope you will find these useful.

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Machines and appliances – infographic


Print the following infographic for your students.
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Machines and appliances vocabulary web

It is a good idea to drill the pronunciation first. Then ask the students to learn the words. I usually give my students about five minutes to do this. Then hand out the following crossword. Let the students complete the crossword. They can use the original infographic.
Machines and appliances vocabulary crossword

You can print the infographic and the crossword using the following pdf file.

Machines and appliances – worksheet pdf

Learn 10 new words in 16 minutes
Learn 10 new words in 16 minutes

There is the famous quote which says that you can say very little without grammar but you can say nothing without vocabulary. I completely agree, and that is why I have created the following post. I aim to teach intermediate students 10 new words.
In this post I am going to teach the words that are among the 4,000 most frequent words. This selection of words is based on Paul Nation´s list of words.
I hope you will find it useful and that you will learn the new words quickly.
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Vocabulary Lesson 1 – mind map

First, you should study the words in the following infographic. I try to give the definition of the word, a clue to remember the word quicker, and some example sentences. I honestly hope these will help you learn the vocabulary better and quicker.
Vocabulary infographics 02

Vocabulary Lesson 1 – interactive quiz

You can practise the vocabulary now in the following interactive quiz. The quiz is in HTML5 and it will play on all mobile devices.


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Interactive quiz – full screen

If you cannot do the quiz above, you can print out the following document and practise the vocabulary there.

Vocabulary_4000_02 worksheet
vocabulary_4000_02_key

Telling time in English
Telling time in English

Telling the time is something I have to teach every year. And to be honest I have not been very successful. Even gifted adults struggled.
And this year I faced even bigger challenge. I was supposed to teach this to a group of challenged children who cannot tell the time in their MT. So I prepared some new materials and … And I did it.
And here is how.
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Telling time – mind map


We started with the following mind map. I asked the children to learn the words for each time.

Telling the time mind map

Then I demonstrated telling the time in English using one of the PAST times. I told them that they have to start with the minutes and then add the clock. The WOW moment came and I was really happy. Then I showed them how to work with the blue phrases. They soon understood that they have to add 1 to the number of clocks.

Telling time – classroom activities


Of course it is nice to understand something but only practise makes masters. So here are several activities we have tried in our class.
First, we played bingo. I dictated the times and the students crossed them out. The winner (3 times in a row) shouted Bingo.
Another variation of the same game is that the students tell the time. Ask each student to choose one time on his card and tell it. The others listen and if they have it on their cards they cross it out.

Telling the time – bingo cards

The other activity is a pair work. Each student gets a card and they dictate their times to their partner.

Telling the time – pairwork

Telling time – computer activities


If you want to provide home practice for your students you can use the following activities. First, you can ask your students to choose the correct time according to what they hear:

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Telling the time – listening

In the second quiz students are asked to write the time correctly. Both quizzes are in HTML5 so they will play anywhere.

Telling the time – produce

You can find another interesting game to practice language connected with time at British Council time.

Telling time – share


Do you like the activities? You can share them on your blog or website. Or if your classroom does not have the internet connection you can use these activities too. The only limitation is that you must not sell the activities.
telling_the_time

Go and do something phrases
Go and do something phrases

In the last half a year I have taught this, in my opinion easy, piece of language and I have failed miserably in both cases. And on the basis of this failure I built this post. It contains a clear explanation in the form of a mind map, a worksheet and two games to practise the phrase.

Go and do something – mind map


The phrase I’ll go and do something is used when we want to express that our willingness or intention to do something. The students have to memorize the following phrase and try to use it creatively.
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Go and do something mind map

Go and do something – games


Once the students master the phrase, it is time to test their knowledge. Here there are two games to practise the phrase.
The first game is in HTML5 and it will play on all mobile devices. Your task is to place the words into the correct gaps. If you pass the test, you can play the game called Make them Fall. Good luck 🙂

Go and do something – Make them fall game

The second game is in Flash and it will play just on your desktop. Your task is to click on the correct answer and then try to stop the circle in the middle of the basket.

Go and do something – Hoopshoot

Go and do something – Share

If you like the games you can use them on your website or offline in your classroom. You can download the files here:

Go and get_quiz (Web)

And the flash game is here:

go_and_do_flash

If you share the files on your website, please, could you provide a link to this site? Thank you 🙂

Vocabulary placement test – beginners
Vocabulary placement test – beginners

Recently we have published a placement test based mostly on grammar. Some of our readers commented that a vocabulary placement test might be useful too. That was why we have tried to create a test which would show you how many words you know. A part of the test is partly based upon the test by Paul Nation, however the first part is completely original.

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This test is for beginners and elementary students of English. Here you can find out, how many words from the 2,000 most common words in English you know. So, if you answer all the questions correctly, you know all the 2,000 most common words in English. If you answer only 50% of the questions, you know 1,000 words. Your aim is to score as much as possible.

Vocabulary placement test – beginners


The following test contains 60 items. Your task is to drag the most suitable word to a given picture or into a given gap. You can guess because there are many extra words which make correct guessing virtually impossible. Once you finish the resulting score tells you how many words you know.

If you want to do the test in a full-screen mode click over here for the HTML5 version:

Placement test vocabulary HTML5

If you want to do the test on your computer and you prefer flash, click on the button below:

Placement test vocabulary flash

If your score is close to 2,000 it is clear that you know more words. If you want to find out how many, you can try our Vocabulary placement tests for pre-intermediate and more advanced students (coming soon on this website.)

Vocabulary placement test – share


If you have a website where you would like to share this test, you can embed it there by placing the following code into it:

<iframe src="http://www.envocabulary.eu/placement test/Vocabulary placement test_beginners (Web)/index.html" width="560" height="500" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Vocabulary placement test – comments


We welcome any comments you might have, because they help us improve the posts here. We try to implement your comments into the activities immediately and we try to answer them. For example, there are nearly 20 comments to the Placement test post and thanks to you we were able to improve several questions, so now the test is much more reliable than it was before. Therefore do not worry and comment. THANK YOU.

TV programmes – learn English vocabulary
TV programmes – learn English vocabulary

Everyone watches TV sometimes. Thus, to be able to speak about what they watch students need some specialised vocabulary. The aim of the following post is to introduce and teach 13 names of TV programmes.
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To achieve this, we have prepared the following activities: a video, a mind map, a pictionary and two games to practise the vocabulary you have learnt.

TV programmes – video


Watch the following video and repeat the words. Go through the video as often as you feel necessary to remember all the words for the TV programmes.

TV programmes – graphically


If you find the video to fast here is a pictionary. You can study the vocabulary from the following picture:

TV programmes pictionary: learn the vocabulary

You can learn the vocabulary here

Once, you feel that you know all the necessary vocabulary, it is a good idea, to print out the following mind map and complete it with all the words you remember. Try to add the names of some real TV programmes you watch too. For example write a comedy programme to the picture of Laurel and Hardy and write there Friends, too.

TV programmes mind map

Write the words you have learnt and examples of the programmes you know.

TV programmes – games


Now you have a chance to practise your knowledge in a playful way. The first quiz is fully in HTML5 so it should play on your mobile devices too. Try to solve the quiz by matching the words and the pictures and by writing the appropriate words to the pictures. If you pass you will play the game called angry Farmer. My best result has been 25. Will you be better than me?

TV programmes – HTML 5 quiz

The second game is going to play only on your desktop as it is in flash. The name of the game is Half a minute and your task is to unjumble the words. Good luck.

TV programmes – Half a minute game