JULY: TEACHING VOCABULARY WITH COMPUTERS

Posted by: "Gladys Baya" gladysbaya@yahoo.com.ar     

Hi, Everyone!

June was certainly an enriching month (at least for me), with lots of sites explored and even an open discussion on whether and how grammar should be taught... Special thanks to Dennis for getting us all thinking on that!  

It's now time to shift our focus... Our agenda says JULY is the month to see how we can use computers to teach VOCABULARY, and now, I'm ready to join you once again and eager to get started!

Kicking off the ball, I've thought of sharing with you a number of options I usually resort to when thinking of teaching vocabulary... Mind you, I'm not thinking of designing our own tasks to get students to practice vocabulary (just because that's not our focus this year), or of ways to present vocabulary (which I believe can be covered when we discuss "reading" and "listening")... Even so, I feel the possibilities are so varied that the best approach is to suggest a few categories, and then get ready to hear from you all so as to expand them!

So here are my favourite sites when it comes to teaching vocabulary in my classes:

Dictionaries and Lexicons:
http://www.dictionary.com - What I particularly like about it is that it provides URLs for each entry, so that I can link a word in a file emailed to a student to its meaning online (I love using this when showing "incorrect words" and suggestingalternatives in student generated texts)
http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx - Cobuild Concordance and Collocations Sampler - my favourite site when I need to determine what collocations are acceptable! (I use this a lot when correcting advanced writing; you can also use it to design tasks to teach collocations!)

Activities:
http://iteslj.org/v/ei/ - English Vocabulary Quizzes Using Images (I learned about this site from Sharon Betts) Try a couple and give wrong answers to see how these quizzes actually "teach" you new words.
http://www.manythings.org/lulu/ - English Vocabulary Games with Pictures (beginners or elementary) – 7 different games for 22 lexical sets (each clearly stating the 9 items included). If audio was integrated, this would be paradise!

Gadgets:
Try:
http://snipr.com/1nuqq to learn about many gadgets you can add to your website, blog template or computer to learn a word a day (several languages, and audio in many cases!)

Have to go now...
Who's sharing a site next?

Big hug,
Gladys

PS: several textbook sites have great activities for this too. Try http://www.oup.com/elt/global/products/adventures/wordgames/crosswords/ if you wonder what I'm talking about!

PS2: thanks for all the birthday greetings! I've been answering them privately to avoid overwhelming the group, and expect to finish replying to those emailed soon.... LOL!

Nahir Aparicio

Larry Ferlazzo

I thought I'd point out the sections of website that have "gobs" of vocabulary sites:

 For Beginners and Early Intermediate

 For Intermediate and Advanced

 I hope you find them helpfu!

Renée Maufroid

Learning Vocabulary in games