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The pandemic has forced many teachers to adapt their materials to be used online. I have been teaching some students who are intermediate and advanced level and I wanted to help them with improving their formal vocabulary as this would be of great help in writing formal essays or reports as required by many of the international examinations. I therefore give them a presentation of 8 new words each week. This is the format of how I conduct this class.
The slide as seen by the students
Each page is prepared with the word at the top and four different definitions of the word below. The students can be asked individually or offer their different opinions as to which is the correct definition of the word.
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The different definitions are actually taken from the other seven words that are to be presented and so as the activity progresses the students can be asked to offer what each of the definitions represent. At first they may only know one word, but this will slowly accumulate as they go through the slides.
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When a student has chosen a definition then move the pointer over the box and it will turn into a hand. Click the box and it will reveal if the answer is right or wrong. For a correct answer the green tick appears, a wrong answer elicits a red cross.
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The students can be challenged to provide the word being defined in each box and if they are correct then click the red cross and the word that is being defined will appear.
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So as you progress through the presentation all the boxes will slowly be revealed. You can use the up arrow to go back to previous slides and have the students tell you the definitions they missed earlier. In this way the students are exposed to the 8 words throughout the introduction so it is not just one word at a time.
The slide when all links are opened
After the 8 words have been introduced there is a quick consolidation exercise where the words are presented as a series of anagrams. The students work out the anagrams and as you click on each word the correct form will be revealed. The students then match the definitions to the new word and clicking on the new word will move it to be next to its correct definition.
The next slide presents all 8 words along with 8 different sentences. The students have to say which word goes into which sentence. In this way the students can see how the word is used in a real context and the solutions can be chosen at random by moving the cursor over the red boxes and clicking on them to reveal the correct word. At the same time that word will disappear from the list, thus making it easier to solve the other sentences.
This exercise once again presents all 8 words in 2 different sentences. It is slightly harder as the words are not shown on the screen. The words may well be in a different form so as to reflect the correct grammatical use in the sentence. To reveal the correct word simply move the cursor to the star in the bottom left of the box and click on the star. The red box will then disappear revealing the correct word.
This is similar to the previous exercise except this time the target word has been replaced by a less formal word. The students have to identify which word in the sentence can be substituted for a better one. If they have difficulty in finding the word, then you can give a clue by clicking on the box that says 'word'. This will show the less formal word. To reveal the answer simply press answer.
The next slide presents all 8 words in a series of 4 sentences each. One of the sentences is incorrect in that it is grammatically wrong or the form of the word is wrong, or it is an inappropriate use of the word. The students have to decide which sentence is wrong for each of the words. The wrong sentence is revealed by moving the cursor over the numbers in the square boxes and clicking on them.
This exercise presents all of the 8 words with three gaps under each one. Underneath are 24 words that consist of 3 synonyms for the list. Students should try and put the correct synonym under the appropriate word. When I play this I usually give the class a limit of 5 mistakes - in other words if they get five of the synonms wrong then teacher wins!! They hate it when teacher wins.
This final exercise shows a narrative text where simpler words are used and so the students need to identify which words can be replaced by the target words. In order to reveal the substitution move the cursor over the text. When it changes into a hand, then that is a place where the word can be substituted. Click on that spot and it will change.
An idea for homework for the students is to have them write a short narrative that includes all 8 of the words. It is important to stress that the narrative needs to be cohesive and make sense. It is not just a collection of 8 random sentences but it should be logical with an appropriate beginning and ending.
Another activity is while presenting the words give the students two of the words and tell them to write a sentence that contains both words. This sentence should be used in the Chat facility that is available in Zoom. The sentence needs to be both grammatically and semantically correct so that the words are used correctly. If the students send their sentence to everybody you can review each one live during the lesson.
Enjoy.
Score Board
The above activities can be presented on one big screen. It is up to the teacher if they want to make the activity into a competition to see who can get the most answers correct. If you want to score the activity then you can use a scoreboard that I have made. At the moment the maximum number of participants is 8, but if you know how to program, you can change the number of participants to as many as you like. If you have more than 8 participants then maybe make a number of teams that can equal up to 8.
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The score board looks like this. I have used this with my Cambodian students and so their names are immortalised here. The scoreboard allows you to add or take away marks and can be seen on every page so that the scores accumulate. The 'R' button on each score allows you to reset the score. The 'R' button on the right allows you to reset all the scores to zero. You can change the names of the participants when the board is in display mode. The original format for this scoreboard is available at http://www.pptvba.com/ If you wish to make your own, you will need some knowledge on basic coding to change it.
To use the scoreboard with the vocabulary exercise you need to open both the scoreboard and the activity in 'Reading View' and not in 'Slide Show'. The slide show will take up the full screen, whereas the reading view allows you to alter the size of each display. Simply alter both presentations to fit the screen together and the scoreboard can still be used even when you change slides.
The view of the game using the scoreboard is like this. Obviously it will be smaller than the full slide show view but I have used this quite successfully with pupils using hand phone screens. This same technique can also be used for the other games I have on this site like Blockbusters and Jeopardy.
This is a list of the different exercises which are arranged into elementary, intermediate and advanced. Click on the picture to enlarge it and see the content or click on the download button to download. More exercises will be added as I prepare more lessons.
This list of presentations can be used for revision of the above exercises. They combine two of the presentations and have exercises to revise the definitions they learned. These should be used several lessons after the first presentation. Each can be found in the appropriate level file that can be downloaded above.
