Tag: vocabulary

Sometimes it is necessary to teach the very basics because students often believe that they know it, but they don’t. Numbers 1-10 are a typical example of superficial knowledge students often have. Even at a young age, they can count from one to ten, but once the numbers don’t go one after another, they are lost.

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In this post, you can learn the words connected with health and disease. Here we will try to teach you the following words: breathe, allergy, obesity, heart attack, depression, decrease, blind, asthma, infectious, disease, lead to, diabetes, increase, deaf, suffer from, dramatic. These words are really important because they can save your life one day.
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To achieve this, you can learn the words using 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.

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.

Health and disease – 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.

Full size image

In this part, you can practise the words. The first interactive puzzle is the wordsearch. Your task is to find all the words. The remaining letters will give you a hidden message:

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.

Health and disease – crossword 1

Health and disease – crossword 2

And as there are many sudoku lovers, I have prepared vocabulary sudoku for you, too. Fill in the words breathe, asthma, allergy, increase, obesity, blind, deaf, disease and decrease 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.

In this post, you can learn the words used for English punctuation. In this post, you can learn the words full stop, apostrophe, comma, hyphen, colon, dash, semicolon, brackets, question mark, slash, exclamation mark, quotation marks, capital letters, small letters, abbreviation and list.
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To help you learn the words, there is a revolutionary method called random repeat which helps you learn the words really fast and effectively. Then there are two crosswords, a wordsearch and a sudoku puzzles to help you practise the new words. I hope you will find this post really useful and you will learn the words for English punctuation here.

Try our revolutionary method of learning vocabulary. It is called Random repeat. Click the PLAY button and listen and repeat the words. Once the screen changes its colour, click on the word which you see in the middle. For example, you see ” “, so you have to click on the words Quotation marks. In this way, you will learn the vocabulary really quickly and well.

Random repeat

If you need some examples of the usage, look here:

He/She can’t make it. slash, apostrophe, full stop
Cheers! – exclamation mark
“Mum, I’m at home,” I said. – Quotation marks, comma, apostrophe, comma, full stop.
This eight-year-old girl is very clever. – hyphen, hyphen, full stop
It is just a short walk – and he still took a taxi. – dash, full stop

If you prefer graphical presentation of new vocabulary, try the following infographic.

English Punctuation – full image

In this part, you can practise all the new words in puzzles.
First, there are two crosswords:

Crossword 1

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Crossword 2

If you prefer a wordsearch try the following puzzle:

Wordsearch

Some people love sudoku. In this post, you can print out a sudoku where your task is to fill in the words apostrophe, slash, brackets, colon, full stop, hyphen, semicolon, comma and dash. In each line, column and small square each word can be used just once.

Vocabulary is much more important than grammar. If you know the meaning of the words you can understand a text even without knowing the grammar. If you listen to a recording and you know the vocabulary, you will understand the meaning of the message.

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If you watch a video and understand the words, you can enjoy the film. However, if you know just the grammar you will not understand much. Therefore, we should devote a lot of classroom time to teaching vocabulary.

Unfortunately, most of us don´t spend much time teaching vocabulary. Many teachers of English assign vocabulary as homework and students have to learn the words at home. It is not an entirely bad method. My research shows that 50% of students actually learn the vocabulary on their own. The bad news is that the other half of students don´t do it. They do not learn the vocabulary and after a while they are completely lost. That´s why I think that we should teach vocabulary at school.

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All the best experts on teaching vocabulary, like Paul Nation or Keith Folse, agree that the best way to teach foreign vocabulary is by using translation. It is the best way for our brain to remember the vocabulary. And in this post, I would like to share with you two methods I have been using to teach vocabulary in my classes. Both of the methods are very effective.

In my article in the magazine English Teaching professional (issue 105), I share with the readers the Remembering Tables method of teaching vocabulary. To do this in your class you need to prepare tables similar to the following:

In the tables on the left, the words are given in both English (in bold letter) and in MT (in this case in Czech). On the right, the tables contain only the Czech words.

At the beginning, read the words in the first table and ask the students to repeat them. Then give the students 20 seconds to study and memorise the words. After this time, they should cover the table and write the words into the table on the right. When they have finished, they uncover the table and check their answers. You go on like this with the rest of the tables, giving the students 30, 40 and 45 seconds respectively.

It is a great classroom activity, but the preparation is a nightmare. To simplify it, I asked a friend to make a word macro which would do all the work for me. And here is the result:

Remembering tables Macro

Download the file. Then create a text file which contains 16 lines – use Notepad for this. On each line there is the word in English the plus sign and the word in the students’ mother tongue (e.g. work+pracovat). Save the file. Then open the downloaded macro. It asks you to Select Text File Containing Words. Click SELECT and choose the txt file you have created. And bingo, your tables are finished and you just print them.

I teach a group consisting of challenged children. Some of them live in bad conditions, some of them have really low IQ and some have behavioral problems. They are fine, but their test results are appalling. But this week I experienced a great teaching success. These students remembered over 80% of the words I taught them. While previously they scored about 50% on average, this time they were nearly twice as successful.

How did we achieve this? I prepared the following vocabulary books for them.

I printed this as a brochure and then I made small books out of it. I handed them out and I asked the students to complete the tables in their free time during my lessons. In the tables with the free lines, students should copy the English words twice and the Czech translation once.

In the other tables, students have to translate the words. If the word is in English, they translate it into their MT and if the word is in their MT they translate it into English (this is 3 times as frequent as the former translation).

The preparation took some time, but the results were fantastic. Try it out and you will see for yourself.

In the issue 105 of English Teaching Professional there is a wonderful article by Chris Payne. It is called Plan V and it deals with vocabulary teaching. Chris explains that teachers should teach vocabulary every lesson, they should teach high frequency words and they should not teach semantic sets. He supports his arguments with research and the whole text is really worth reading.

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For me, the most important idea to teach thematic sets instead of semantic sets. Research shows that it takes much longer to learn words in semantic sets than it takes to learn unrelated vocabulary items. However, “it was found that grouping words according to a theme, so long as they belong to a different class, can aid retention and enhance learning…” (Chris Payne, English teaching professional issue 105). Therefore, teachers should teach thematic sets instead of semantic sets.
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What is the difference between a semantic and thematic set? An example of a semantic set is for example the category clothes. Words like jumper, skirt, shirt, trousers, gloves, T-shirt etc. create a semantic set. A thematic set are the words used for a given theme. Thus a thematic set for a frog, consists of words swim, green, hop, pond, croak and slippery. And these thematic sets are much easier to learn.

However, if you start to search the internet, you will find that these thematic sets are very difficult to find. That is why I would like to create and publish several such sets here.

All the words in the Birthday set were chosen in the following way. There can be only two words which are the same part of speech. Therefore, there are only two nouns, two verbs and two adjectives. These words are then organised into a mind map and their meaning is illustrated.

Under the mind map you can find example sentences. It might be a good idea to read the sentences with your students aloud to practise the pronunciation.

On the second page, there are two exercises for the students to practise the vocabulary. In the first task, students read the sentences and complete them with the words from the mind map.

In the second exercise, students should read the sentences aloud, replacing the pictures with the appropriate words.

You can download the pdf file with the worksheets here:
Pdf worksheet

Do you think these thematic sets are useful? Vote here:

In English there are many words which have the same or very similar meaning. Words that have the similar meaning are called synonyms. In this post, I am going to present synonyms for the words DIFFICULT and HARD.
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In this post, there are two quizzes to practise the new vocabulary and an infographic explaining the meaning of the words.

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The words DIFFICULT and HARD have a similar meaning and you can use the word HARD instead of DIFFICULT nearly all the time (BUT you cannot use DIFFICULT instead of HARD!!!) However, in English there are many other words which are used instead of the word DIFFICULT. You can see them in the infographic below. The meaning of each word is explained and the usage is demonstrated in a sentence.

To display the image on the full screen, right-click the picture and open it in a new window. You can print the image then, too.

You can test your knowledge of the vocabulary in the following two quizzes. The first quiz consists of three parts. In the first part, you should unjumble the words and type them. In the second part, you have to choose the correct definition for each word. In the third part, you have to complete the sentences with the right words. The quiz is in HTML5, so it will play on all desktops and mobile devices.

Difficult and Hard – quiz

The first quiz serves as a way to practise the vocabulary. The second quiz is different. At the end, you will be asked to supply your name and your result will be displayed in a leaderboard.

The quiz consists of two parts. In the first part, you see a definition and you have to type the correct word. In the second part, you see a sentence and you have to type the missing word. Good luck and share your results please.

[WpProQuiz 19]

[WpProQuiz_toplist 19]

Mobile phones are bad! Students spend hours on mobile apps and they do not learn! What can we do about it?

I tried to do something about it. I prepared a responsive website for my students to learn on their mobiles and … they didn´t come.

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But then I created my first android app and everything changed. I became a school hero and students have been showing me their mobiles with my app on them.

And I wondered: Why do they suddenly learn on their mobiles?

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The answer is simple. Data is expensive and when the students decide to use the internet, they do it to socialize. And let´s be honest, my static website is no competition for sites like Facebook or Instagram.

But as the app does not require the internet connection, it sits in their mobile phones and waits for the moment when the students disconnect. And then the students start to play the vocabulary game. Several factors play their role here. First, students can use their mobile phones, second, no one blames them that they do not learn, and third, they make their parents and teachers happy by playing a mobile app on their phone.

So what does the “miracle” application do?

It is quite simple. There appears a word on the screen in students´ MT and they have to type the word in English. If they answer incorrectly the correct answer is shown, and the word gets repeated after a while.

There are sixty levels and students get points and stars for their performance.

You can download the mobile app at Google Play. It is called “Top 450 slovicek v aj final“.

In my application they learn 450 most frequent words in English. You can see the screenshots here:

As this app is incredibly easy to customise, I can offer you the following: If you send me a text file with 450 words + their translation or definitions I will make an app for you which you can offer your students.

I will do it for free.

The only thing I want is, that I may later use the text file in any way I want.

For a long time I felt that I was missing a post on this site on parts of the body. But I wasn’t inspired enough to close this gap. Fortunately, a few days ago Jason Levine from FLUENCY MC published a wonderful video dealing with the relevant vocabulary. It got me started. This post is another result of a fruitful partnership between Engames and Fluency MC.

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Engames and Fluency MC have cooperated on a number of posts in the past. Together we created four posts on irregular verbs based on Fluency MC’s popular video. We’ve also created posts on Collocations with the Verb HAVE, on the Gerund or Infinitive, and on Parts of Speech. And here comes the latest fruit of our cooperation – Parts of the Body.

In this post you will find the song, an infographic, a quiz and a game that will help you learn or teach the vocabulary.

This is the wonderful song by Fluency MC. I recommend that you listen to it, then sing and perform it together with your students.

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I was looking for a suitable picture for a long time, and I feel this one is perfect.

What to do with it? Print it and hand it out, then check that your students can pronounce the words correctly. Once you finish, ask them to cover the picture on the left and write the names of the body parts on the right. In this way they will practice all the parts.

If you want the picture in full HD you can download it below:

Parts of the body – full image

The following quiz will help your students practise the parts of the body. They can do it either at school or at home. The quiz consists of two parts. In the first part, students should match the pictures with the names of the body parts. In the second part, students have to click on the correct part of the body. The students will be rewarded with a game after each part of the quiz they pass. The quiz is in HTML5, so it will play on all desktops and mobile devices.
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To get to the second part of the quiz, you have to click on the right next to the advert at the top during the game Angry Finches!!!

Parts of the Body – quiz

This game is in Flash and will play only on desktop computers. It is called On Target. Your task is to choose the correct option and then shoot all the bad frogs and ducks. You can shoot one of the bottles on the wall to get a bonus. Enjoy.

Parts of the body – On target game

You can find nice activities to teach or learn Parts of the Body at British Council site.

Yesterday English Through Music published an awesome song called “How are you?”. As the song is easy to remember and sing, I contacted Jules and asked him for a permission to write a post around the song. He kindly agreed and here you can see the result.
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This post is mainly for beginners or very young learners of English. It contains the song, an infographic and a simple quiz with games. Moreover, there are several suggestions how to exploit this wonderful materials more.

The following song was written and published by English Through Music. You can find their website here and there are more wonderful songs at Youtube English Through Music channel.

First listen and sing along:

Other activities you could do:
a) ask the students to perform an action for each of the adjectives (happy – smile, angry – pretend to be angry, etc.)
b) ask the students to listen and draw a picture for each adjective.
c) ask the students to mingle and ask each other “How are you?” and their partner must answer.

I am sure there are many more activities you will come up with. If you do, please share them with us.

Moreover, English Through Music promises to come up with an action video for the song soon.

Here I have created a simple infographic for learners to take home with them. It presents all the vocabulary taught in the song in a simple and clear way. Pupils can use it to revise the vocabulary at home.

Another way in which students can practise what they learnt at home is the following interactive quiz. Of course you can use it at school, too.

The quiz is in HTML5, so it will play on all electronic devices.
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In the first part, students match the pictures and the adjectives. If they succeed they will be rewarded with the game called angry finches.
In the second part they have to write the appropriate adjective into the gap provided. If they pass this quiz too, they can play the game called Math Pop and practise their Maths.

How are you? – quiz

A few days ago my friend Shanthi Cumaraswamy Streat publised a great post called “20 Phrasal Verbs with ‘BRING’ – Let’s Explore“. I liked it so much that I contacted Shanthi and she kindly agreed to my turning her post into infographics and games. And here you can see the final result of our great cooperation.

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On her blog http://englishwithatwist.com/ Shanthi comes up with twenty different meanings of the phrasal verbs with BRING. Here, we tried to put the information in two infographics (as it was not possible to put all the information into just one 🙂 ).

You can download the full-size pictures here:
Phrasal verbs with Bring infographic 1

Phrasal verbs with Bring infographic 2

Once the students study the infographics, it is time to practise their knowledge. I created 3 games to help them with the revision.

The first game is called On Target. Students should read the sentence and complete it with the correct option A-D. If they answer correctly, they are given a chance to shoot the bad ducks. They can shoot one of the bottles on the sides and get a bonus. This game is in Flash and it will play only on desktops.

Phrasal verbs with Bring – On Target

The second game is called Penalty Shoot Out. At school students love playing in two teams against each other. They have to choose the correct answer and then they should score a goal. It is not easy but it is great fun. This game is in Flash and it will play only on desktops.

Phrasal verbs with Bring – Penalty

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The third game is called Goose Science Quiz and the students click on the die and move forward. From time to time they have to answer a question. If they answer correctly they move forward and if they answer incorrectly they move backwards. The winner is the student who gets to the FINISH first. The game is in HTML5 and it will play on all electronic devices.

Phrasal verbs with Bring – Quiz

If you want to see the original blog post by Shanthi go here.

There are several interesting posts on Phrasal verbs at British Council pages too.

In this post we tried to introduce twenty different meanings of Phrasal verbs with Bring. If you would like to see more posts on phrasal verbs, you can go to Phrasal verbs in a story or Phrasal verbs Fred and Betty.

Phrasal verbs with BRING

This is the third post which contains ten new words for intermediate students. The words are among the 4,000 most frequent words in English. This selection of words is based on Paul Nation’s list of words. If you have missed the first post on vocabulary, you can find it here. The second post Learn 10 words in 21 minutes is here.
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I hope you will find it useful and that you will learn the new vocabulary. To achieve this, there are a worksheet, a mind map with the words, an interactive exercise and a video with the correct pronunciation.

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. Be careful with the memory aids, though. They work perfectly for me, but it does not mean that they will work for you. If you feel they are unhelpful, just skip them. I honestly hope these will help you learn the vocabulary better and quicker.

To get the pronunciation right, listen and repeat the words with the native speaker.

You can practise the vocabulary now in the following interactive quiz. The quiz is in HTML5 and it will play on all mobile devices. If you pass the quiz you can play the game Indiara as a reward.

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Interactive quiz – full screen

If you cannot do the quiz above or you prefer working on a paper, you can print out the following document and practise the vocabulary there.

Vocabulary part 4_ws

Vocabulary part 4_key

Present simple is one of the most important tenses in English. It is quite easy to teach and learn but it must be done properly. In this post I am going to teach some vocabulary first and then teach the forms using the verbs.
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In this post you can find a worksheet, a video and an interactive quiz to teach the vocabulary for daily activities. Once your students know the verbs it is time to introduce the forms – present simple tense affirmative, present simple tense negative and present simple tense questions.

First have a look at the following pictionary:

If you need the pronunciation, you should try the following video. In the second part of the video there is a quiz to practise the words. There appear the words and you have about 3 seconds to say the word before you hear it.

To practise the vocabulary there are several activities. The first one is an interactive quiz. You have three tasks. First, match the words and the pictures, second, click the correct image and third write the words. The quiz is in HTML5 so it will work anywhere.

If you would like to play the quiz on the full screen, click the following button.
Daily activities – quiz

There are four more activities in a print form. Print out the following worksheets and solve them:
Daily routine_worksheet

When the students know the vocabulary, I believe it is time to introduce the grammar.

Here is a short song to practise the daily activities. It may serve as a good way to introduce the grammar too, as all the sentences are in present simple tense.

You could just play the song to the students or you could ask them to listen and complete the lyrics
I wake up in the morning

Here is the infographic for present simple tense:
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The infographic contains a lot of details. If you think it would be too much for your students, feel free to cut it into parts and present the different forms at different times.

To help my students remember the grammar, I tell stories. I tell them in their mother tongue as their purpose is to help the students remember the grammar. I have already presented the story about questions here and you can find it in our post on Questions.
Here, there are two more stories to highlight the grammar.
The first story explains why people use the ending -s in third person singular.
In English there is the sound PSST which is used to draw someone’s attention. A long long time ago people did not gossip. But then they started to speak about someone else but no one listened. But those people who gossiped needed attention so they started to use the PSST sound. They said:
Nikola (use students’ names, it is more fun and people listen) cook PSST very badly.
Adam play PSST football. Jane like PSST English. And so on.
And as people spoke quicker and quicker they soon reduced the PSST sound to the ending -s. So ever since when we speak about 1 person who is not me or you, we use the ending -s.

The other story explains the usage of DON’T.
Do you know what sound do bells make in English. DING DONG! It is very important because I will tell you a story that happened in the year 756. On 15th June suddenly three bells fell from a church tower in the English town Epston and they became alive. Suddenly they had legs and they walked around the country. And they spoke. People came to them and they asked them. “Do you live here?” “We,” started the bells but suddenly the sound DONG came from inside, “DONG live here.”
“Do you like music?” people asked.
“We DONG like music?”
“Do you do any work?”
“We DONG work.”
People spoke about these bells everywhere. “They dong like music.” “They dong work.” And as the time passed they changed the DONG sound to don’t and ever since we use DON’T in negative sentences. Later people added the form DOESN’T in third person singular.
And what happened to the bells? As they could not do anything they put them back on the tower and they never became alive again.

To practice the grammar I have created the following interactive quizzes.
The first quiz is a game calleed On Target. Your aim is to choose the correct answer and then shoot as many bad ducks as possible. You can shoot a bottle on the side too and win a bonus. The game is in flash and it plays on desktops only.

To play the game on the full screen, click the button below.

Present simple tense – On Target

The second quiz is in HTML5 and thus it will play everywhere.

To play the game on the full screen, click the button below.

Present simple tense – QUIZ

You might miss here a worksheet with some communicative activities. So do I. But as I do not have any I would like to ask you to send me yours. If it is good and I decide to publish it here, I will Paypal you 10$. Please send the worksheets to rotreklzdenek@gmail.com. Thank you.
Remember the worksheets have to be your own.

This is the second post which contains ten new words for intermediate students. The words are among the 4,000 most frequent words in English. This selection of words is based on Paul Nation’s list of words. If you have missed the first post on vocabulary, you can find it here.
I hope you will find it useful and that you will learn the new words. This time it will take a bit longer as there are more exercises in the print version and there is the video with the pronunciation of the words.
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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.

To get the pronunciation right, listen and repeat the words with the native speaker.

You can practise the vocabulary now in the following interactive quiz. The quiz is in HTML5 and it will play on all mobile devices. If you pass the quiz you can play a game as a reward.

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Interactive quiz – full screen

If you cannot do the quiz above or you prefer working on a paper, you can print out the following document and practise the vocabulary there.

Vocabulary_4000_set003_ws
Vocabulary_4000_set003_key

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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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.

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

There are many different states and nationalities in the world and we cannot know all of them. However, it is necessary that you know your own nationality and the name of your state. Moreover, I think that you should know at least the names of the most populous countries. That is why I have created the following post. There is a video presentation of 15 countries and nationalities. Then there are these states presented in a mind map and several quizzes to practice the new vocabulary.
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Here is a video presentation of all the countries and nationalities taught in this post. Each country and nationality is pronounced by a native speaker and there is their flag.

Next you can listen and sing the following song and try to solve the quiz here. If you succeed you can play a tic-tac-toe game against the computer.

After watching the videos above you can ask the students to fill in the following mind map with the correct states and nationalities. If you do not want to teach the nationalities, you can ask your students to fill in the name of the state and all the things they can say in English about each state. (e.g. Italy, pasta, Rome).

Here you can find all the states and nationalities in the wordsearch.

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And finally, here is a game Teacher invaders to practise all that you know.

Follow @Zdendaa

 

As a teacher working with a textbook you often need to pre-teach a lot of new vocabulary, because otherwise the text on the following page will be incomprehensible to your students, or you will face a barrage of questions „What does this word mean?“ However, when you scourge the literature for methods how to do this effectively and in a relatively short time you will see that there is very little help there.
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Even though P. Nation in his book Teaching Vocabulary Strategies and Techniques claims that „Every piece of research comparing deliberate learning with incidental learning has shown that deliberate word learning easily beats incidental vocabulary learning in terms of the time taken to learn and the amount learned,“ (Nation p. 104) there are only very few methods for deliberate teaching of vocabulary. In fact Nation in his book mentions only two: word cards and keyword technique.

Therefore I decided to start from there.

This method is quite demanding to prepare. You have to prepare a stack of cards for each student.On one side of the card there is the word in the student’s mother tongue and on the other there is the word in English.
The teacher pronounces the words and the students repeat them. Then you ask the students to turn the cards so that they would see the English words. They work on their own. They read the word in English (silently) and translate it into their MT. Then they turn the card and if the translation corresponds with the word they produced they place the card at the back of the stack. If it didn´t they place the card somewhere near the center of the stack.
In this way the students work for 2 minutes. After the two minutes the students turn the whole stack to see the words in their MT. The students now have to say the words in English (aloud). Then they turn the cards and check their answers again and if their translation is correct the card goes to the end of the stack and if it isn´t it goes to the centre. After 4 minutes the students put the cards down and they work on something else.
After 10 or 15 minutes they return to the cards again and they repeat the procedure but this time the times are shortened to 30 seconds and 1 minute.

Students are given words with their translation in their MT. Students listen and repeat the words with the teacher and then they are given a worksheet with 4 different crosswords. Each crossword contains all the words they should learn and the students´ task is to solve all the crosswords. The students usually needed between 20 and 25 minutes to do this (of course it depends on the number of the words).
The greatest disadvantage of this method is the fact that you need 4 crosswords which take a lot of paper and time to prepare.

Honestly, I love this method. I think it is similar to the key word method and therefore it is quite successful.
The teacher prepares short verses which are in the students´ MT and at the end of each line there is the target word in English. This target word rhymes with an MT word which is somewhere in the middle of the verse. (see the example below)

You can see an example of the rhymes in Czech. The highlighted words rhyme with the bold words and there is a translation of the target word at the end of each line.
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Students first read the verses aloud and the teacher corrects their pronunciation of the target words. Then they have 2 minutes to remember the rhyming word, the target word and the translation. After the two minutes students turn their papers with the rhymes face down. The teacher reads the rhymes randomly and he pauses before the bold words and the students say the missing word. If they cannot produce the bold word, the teacher says the word and the students repeat it and the teacher later reads the problematic line again.
After going through all the words in this way, the teacher randomly reads only the MT translations and the students say the words. If the students fail to produce the word, the teacher returns to it again a few words later.
It is a good idea to prepare a table with the MT words and ask the students to complete it with the English words at the end of the procedure. Thus the students recycle the vocabulary.

This method is very easy to prepare and doesn´t take much time. To prepare this it is enough to have a list of English words with their translation for each student. Read the words to your students and let them repeat the words. Then give them 3 minutes to commit the words to memory. In the meantime hand out dice. At the end of the allocated time ask the students to work in pairs and play the following game.
One of the students will take the die and turn the list of words face down. He/She will throw the die and his/her partner will choose a random word in MT from the list. If the student says the word in English correctly he writes down as many points as there are on his/her die. If he doesn´t produce the word correctly, he will get 0 points. The students should write their points on a piece of paper as to keep their scores in order. After 5 throws the students swap their roles. The students can swap their roles as many times as they like but they have only 7 minutes to play. The world record in this game is 103 points 🙂

This activity is simple to organise and prepare.
In the first phase the teacher hands out the lists of words where the words are in English and MT. The teacher then reads the words aloud and the students repeat them. Then the students have 3 minutes to remember the words.
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Students work in pairs. They use the grid and go along the lines and together say the words in English. If they do not know the word, they can have a look into the original table. The grid is usually a table 3×25 and all the words there are in MT and they are in random order. (see below)

After about 3 minutes the activity changes and the students play the game Swimming pool. Students work in pairs or groups of three and each chooses a column. They mustn´t choose the same column as their partner. Once the teacher says start they start saying the words in their column aloud in English. They start with the word at the top of their column and they go down. If they do not know the word they can have a look into the original table. The winner is the student who gets to the last word in their column first.
As all the students speak at the same time it is a bit of a mayhem but it is not that bad.
Once all of them finish their columns, students change columns and play the game again. Students can play the game as many times as you like, but three times is ideal.
In the last step the students have 4 minutes to write all the words into the grid. If they do not know the word they can have a look into the original table. They mustn´t leave any square empty.

Students usually do not like this method very much. It might be caused by the fact that they feel exposed and uncomfortable, but anyway their feelings do not seem to influence their learning results.

Teacher gives each student a word to remember and tells him/her its meaning in MT. Students and the teacher stand in a circle and they get their hands ready. On count of three they clap twice and the first student says his assigned word in English and Czech. Students clap twice and the second student says his word in Czech and English. Thus they go till they get to the last student.
In the second round the students again clap twice, but this time they say their words only in English. They go like this till all the students said their words.
In the third round students clap twice and the first student says her word in English. Students clap twice and the second student says the first student’s word, students clap twice and he says his word. The third student repeats the first student’s word, clap clap, the second student’s word and her word. Thus it goes till the last student repeats all the words.
Then all the students say all the words together and they clap after each twice. Students sit down and the teacher hands out tables where only the MT meaning is given. Students´ task is to complete the table with the new words. Then one of the students should write the words on the board and the students check their answers.
Below you can see a part of the table the students complete:

The greatest disadvantage of this method is the fact that the number of students present is extremely improtant. The ideal situation is when there are as many students as there are words to be taught. It is not advisable to give more than 1 word to each student.
I hope you will find these methods useful.

Have you tried our vocabulary placement test for elementary students, and it was too easy for you? Have you scored close to 2000? Then this is the vocabulary test you should take. Here we test the words which belong between 2,000 and 5,000 most frequent words in English.
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There are 60 questions and the score at the end tells you how many words from the 3,000 words you know. If you add this score to the score from the test for elementary students, you will know how many words from the five thousand most frequent words in English you know.

Give a try to the following test. The score at the end of the test tells you how many words you know. So if it tells you that your Score is: 2,350 points it means that you know 2,350 out of the 3,000 words which belong into the group of 2,000 to 5,000 most frequent words in English.

If you want to do the test on the full screen, click the button below. The test is made in HTML5 so it will play on your mobile phones as well:
Vocabulary placement test – full screen

If you want to know the total number of English words that you know among the 5,000 most frequent words in English take the Vocabulary test for elementary students and then add the score to the score from the test above. Thus if you score here 1,750 and in the elementary test 1,800, you know 3,550 words from the 5,000 most frequent words in English.

Remember, THE MORE ENGLISH WORDS YOU KNOW THE BETTER YOUR ENGLISH IS!!!!

Please, if you spot a mistake, or you come up with a better definition, please leave a comment. We are trying to improve each activity, and your comments help us a lot.
Thank you.

Recently I published a post on TV programmes vocabulary. In this post I would like to add a few activities to help the teachers prepare a great lesson on this topic and to give students a few more activities to practise the vocabulary.

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Unlike in the previous posts, there are several worksheets which you can print out and use. There is a song and a gap fill, a bingo worksheet and a worksheet with five more activities to practise the vocabulary connected with TV programmes. And of course there is a mind map to help you remember the new words better.

I love using songs at the beginning of a lesson. Especially if they are popular, they can serve as a great starter. If you are just a learner of English, you can try the interactive quiz below.

For this lesson, I am going to use the song Throw Away your Television by Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

Complete the lyrics:

I you need the lyrics for your classroom or a you simply prefer paper materials, here are two pdf files.

TV song_red hot chilli peppers

TV song red hot chilli peppers – key

At the end of the song I will elicit the topic of the lesson by the following questions:
What will be the lesson about?
What will we learn?

Once I get the topic of the lesson out of the students I move to the other part of the lesson.

There are three ways to go about presenting vocabulary. I would use the video from the previous post on TV programmes vocabulary and the following mind map.

If you do not like any of the materials above, all the new vocabulary is listed in the worksheets too.

The practice is based upon the following worksheets. Print them out and follow the instructions:

TV programmes

TV programmes_answers

If you have already presented the students with the video and a mind map, start with the second exercise. Students should put the words into the correct form and complete the sentences. Once they complete them, discuss the questions in pairs and then as a whole class.

The other exercises are quite simple and quite fun. Ask the students to do as much as they can in 10 minutes. You can give them the answers at the end of the activity or you can check their answers.

Once we do the worksheets, I give my students a chance to use the new words creatively. Ask them to write 3-10 questions using the new words. Help the struggling students by giving them the simple example What sports programmes do you watch? and show them that they can create 12 questions by replacing the words sports programmes with other TV programmes vocabulary.

When the students write the questions give them a chance to ask you their questions. Answer the questions and at the same time you have a chance to correct the most striking mistakes.

After a while ask the students to discuss the questions in pairs.

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At the end of the lesson I try to put a game. This time I have prepared the Bingo game for my students. Print out the following worksheet and cut it. Shuffle the cards and give each student one. Ask them to work in pairs and say the names of the TV programmes they have on their cards. They can ask you if they are not sure.

TV programmes bingo call card

TV programmes bingo cards

If you are sure that the students know all the words there are two options for you. You can either read the words yourself or I ask each student to say one of the words. Remember to state the winning combination before you start the game.

And that is the end of the lesson. If I count correctly, the lesson will take about 40 minutes.

Some posts take quite a long time to produce, but this one was an extreme case. Four people participated on it and I think we have produced a great material to teach vocabulary connected with sports.

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In my opinion there is everything. There is a video to help students with the pronunciation of the words. There are two mind maps to help you organise the new vocabulary in a way that will be easy to remember. And at the end of the post there are several activities to help the students learn all the words.

Watch the video. Listen to the American pronunciation of the words and repeat.


In the following mind map you can see all the words and phrases clearly organised.

The second mind map can serve as a worksheet. Your task is to complete it with the right words.
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This time all the quizzes are in HTML5 so they will play on your mobile devices.

The first quiz is a way to learn the words. Listen and repeat the words. Then complete the quiz and go on. There will appear another set of words and a quiz. And so on.

Learn Sports vocabulary

The second game is called Kim’s game. You will see a set of pictures and then three of them will vanish. Your task is to write the words for the given missing words. However, you have just one minute to remember. And then three more pictures will vanish. Are you able to recall all the words?

Kims game – sports vocabulary

The third quiz is a dictation. In the first phase you will listen to several sentences and you have to click on the words you hear in the sentences. In the second phase you have to listen to the sentences and write them. Good luck.

Sport – dictation and listening

In this post I would like to introduce about 20 new words connected with towns. These words are neccessary if you want to speak about the place where you live or stay.

The vocabulary is for elementary and pre-intermediate students and it covers different basic features which can be found in towns and cities.
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This post contains a video with the correct pronunciation and example sentences. Then there is a mind map to help you organise the vocabulary and learn it. In the last part there are several games to give you an opportunity to practise the town vocabulary.

Watch the video and repeat the words you hear and see. Try to understand the example sentences and later try to repeat them too:

If you feel that you need to practise the words, watch the video several times.

Now you should try to complete the following mind map with all the words from the video. The words are listed in the bottom right corner of the mind map:




The first game will test your vocabulary knowledge. There are several quizzes and then, if you succeed, you can play a game. The game is called Hot race.

Town vocabulary – quizzes and games

Many of my students feel that listening is the most difficult skill. Therefore, I have prepared the following dictation activity. You will hear several sentences and your task is to write the sentence you hear. If you are successful, you will get a chance to play the game Rock, scissors and paper. (Of course, you can skip the game, if you do not want to play it. Just click on the NEXT button and you will get another dictation.)

Town vocabulary – dictation