Vocabulary Activities

Workbooks and activities for teaching English vocabulary

FREE — Sample Lesson for Building Vocabulary — “Bad Words”

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building vocabularyBuilding vocabulary can be especially difficult with reluctant readers. I personally know quite a number of adults who were formerly reluctant readers themselves. What eventually turned them on to reading? Comic books! There are even comic book versions of most literary classics now.

After all, who doesn’t love a classic “super hero vs. villain”building vocabulary story? In this vocabulary lesson, “Bad Words,” we find our super hero, “Captain Lexicon” battling his nefarious nemesis, Doc Nuisance, who wants to stink up the town with a noxious gas. Building vocabulary is easy and fun with activities students find interesting. It’s the “Comic Con” of vocabulary lessons!

Capitalizing on what is already appealing to them is one way to “hook” kids. The lesson’s title, “Bad Words” lets them think something naughty. The bait-and-switch comes later. Instead of expletives, or similar interjections, the “bad” words found in the vocabulary exercises in this lesson turn out to be college-prep vocabulary words. Maledictions, Batman!

To download a free .pdf of the sample lesson, “Bad Words,” click here:

Taking the GramMarch Challenge

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With the end of March rapidly approaching, I couldn’t let the month expire without commenting on middle school teacher Heather Shotke’s “GramMarch Challenge,” a quest to halt students’ use of social media shorthand in their academic work and written texts. While the “English teacher” in me cheers on the GramMarch Challenge and lauds Ms. Shotke for her gumption, the “poet” in me questions the need to tamper with the relentless march of living language.

social media shorthandWitness, for example, what the Twitterverse is capable of in the hands of such formidable poets as Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Pinsky, and Claudia Rankine, whose Twitter poems have been featured in the New York Times. In fact, Twitter, with its classic “soul of wit,” has given rise to a whole new genre of abbreviated literature, dubbed “Twitterature“. However, it does not elude the keen readers’ notice that while these poems (and by extension, the very concept of “Twitterature” itself) gleefully embrace and celebrate the possibilities for utilizing a pared language to concede a truncated literary form, the poets themselves are incapable of escaping the impulse for likewise employing a highly developed, even stalwart vocabulary. For example, in “Teeny tiny poem,” Elizabeth Alexander meets the 140-character constraint, but manages nonetheless to work the word Impluvium into the space. Likewise, Claudia Rankine’s Twitter poem, “earth donates,” includes the line: “fallout active plume cloud spills/” — in which the word plume gives away the poet’s highly developed vocabulary.

Of course, it also cannot elude keen readers’ notice that these poets’ consummate use of the language did not occur without prolonged development of their skills. This brings us back around to the question of the GramMarch Challenge: should we make an effort to halt students’ use of social media shorthand in their academic work and written texts? On this question, I must side with no less than the venerable professor William Strunk, Jr., co-author of The Elements of Style, whose entire body of work asserts that “one must first know the rules to break them.” This is, after all, the purpose of formal education: teaching students the rules and conventions of Standard Edited English, so that once they’ve mastered them, they’re freed to break them. And for that, I’d have to say, “Kudos” to Heather Shotke on issuing the GramMarch Challenge.

 

How Does Vocabulary Predict Success?

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Taking a TestMuch ado has been made in the last week or so about the coming changes to the SAT, the entrance exam many colleges and universities in the U.S. use to gauge the potential success of prospective applicants. Besides making the essay component optional in 2016, the College Board, who designs, administers, and scores the exams, has announced its plan to re-vamp the often dreaded vocabulary section, in order to update and modernize its word selections. Reportedly, no longer will examinees’ knowledge and comprehension of archaic words (which have little bearing on current fields of college study, or real-world application) be tested. Instead, the College Board asserts, academic and content-specific words (in line with Common Core Curriculum Standards, and critical to college and real-world success) will start showing up on the exams with the new and improved SAT, beginning in 2016.

The announcement of sweeping changes to the stalwart college entrance exam has brought about yet another round of questioning the efficacy of the exams in fulfilling their stated mission of predicting just exactly who is most likely (and, by elimination, who isn’t likely) to succeed in college in the first place. Which begs the question: what’s the point in testing students’ vocabulary anyway? How, exactly, does someone’s vocabulary equate with college and/or real-life success?

As anyone who has followed Arthur Chu‘s meteoric (albeit controversial) rise to fame and fortune on Jeopardy in recent weeks can tell you, there’s a lot to be gleaned from erudition. It is clear, for example, that most (if not all) of Mr. Chu’s knowledge comes primarily from reading (widely and on a broad range of topics) as demonstrated by the fact that although he correctly identified so many of the “questions” implied by the answer clues, he mispronounced quite a few of them–an indicatation that while he’s encountered these words frequently on the printed page, he doesn’t use them regularly in conversation.

StudentIt’s no secret that students with the highest level of reading comprehension skills are the ones who will do the best in college, since college is based primarily on reading. Students who read develop larger and better vocabularies as a natural consequence of their reading, due to their exposure to words in print. Therefore, the more widely a student reads, the broader his/her vocabulary is likely to be. So, if you want a “short cut” to assessing a student’s reading comprehension skill level, the easiest way to determine that is to measure the breadth of his/her vocabulary.

However, as anyone who teaches real, live students can attest, sometimes students lack the vocabulary skills necessary to decode what they’re reading, which is why the new Common Core State Standards also stress direct, independent vocabulary instruction. In other words: the two (vocabulary and reading comprehension) are intimately linked–students who read a lot develop better vocabularies, and students who work at developing their vocabularies become better readers.  Thus, reading comprenension and vocabulary skills go hand-in-hand. No surprise.

That explains why vocabulary has long been used to augur college success, but how does this equate to long-term accomplishment in terms of real-world success? This is where Arthur Chu’s example also comes in handy–it’s not enough merely to read and/or study the words as they occur in print. Putting “theory into practice” is where the rubber really meets the road: students must also apply what they’ve read by working academic and content-specific vocabulary words into their own written texts and/or daily interactions and conversations. The more practiced they are at using their vocabularies to communicate clearly in all situations (reading, writing, speaking, and listening), the more confident they will become. The more confident they become, the better they will perform on any test of their language fluency, whether that test is the SAT, an appearance on Jeopardy, a job interview, or a salable business plan.

In life, as in college, success requires half skill and half confidence–as students work on their skills, their confidence will grow.