TESL 0130: Unit 3 - Creating a Vocabulary Activity

This week has been a good reminder of what learners experience when they are frustrated in their learning.  A few times this week (probably more than a few if I am honest), I have wondered "How will I ever get to the point when this is not hard for me?"  And the funny answer is that I have had this same conversation with our children when they were in school, college or university - sometimes you have to work at it to get it.  Please do not misunderstand - I am not saying I get it yet, but that I am more comfortable now than I was earlier this week that I am getting it, even if it is hard.

As part of our week, we were to assess and create strategies for reading within an existing lesson plan - I did not realize that I have strategies that I use actively for reading various types of communication and they are different depending on what I am reading.  It is a good reminder to me that students will not use the same strategies for the various pieces of text that they need to read, and I need to ensure that I am taking that into consideration when providing strategies.  Offer options, make suggestions, and take suggestions for how it might be done better than I originally planned the lesson.  Ensure you build flex into the lesson and have a "Plan B" on standby.

Secondly, we were asked to create a vocabulary activity to support vocabulary development.  After working with the given lesson plan for the reading activities, I decided to stay with that lesson plan concept for my activity.  I chose to create an activity that supports vocabulary, but is also laced with digital literacy, some writing and reading strategies, and categorizing.  By employing more skills than doing only one task, I hope that the activity is more interesting, engaging, and meaningful for learners.  

While I was online looking for resources this week I found a site called www.fluentu.com and it has 10 ideas for vocabulary support for learners. Similar to the idea that is shared in Brown & Lee on semantic mapping or clustering (pp. 404), I liked the idea of categorizing and so I deviated from the lesson plan list of vocabulary to try to accomplish a few things with this activity:

• Establish learner skill around reading for specific content.
• Categorize vocabulary.
• Support learner autonomy about what they believe are important words (there are likely to be differences in the lists of learners; and probably different from the teacher list I created).
• Several times I have asked learners to "put pen/pencil to paper" - this is for the purpose of retention - studies continue to show that we retain what we interact with - retention is better when we write things out (and it supports writing development).
• There is also an opportunity for some digital literacy development by using the online dictionary or thesaurus which is very good for personal skills and employment skills development.
• Finally, I've included a written exercise to support the vocabulary development and integration of that vocabulary in their own life (How does it relate to me? Can I find a way to assimilate this word in "my world"?)

The link to the lesson plan is below - please take a moment to look at it and I welcome your feedback.  Did it do what I intended for it to accomplish?

TESL 0130: Unit 3 - Vocabulary Activity

It has been a full week.  Collaboration with other learners has been enlightening and the outcome was positive in terms of yielding ideas and the corralling those to something we were prepared to share.  Our class is no different than EAL classes in that we have a variety of learner levels and ability, backgrounds and ideas - that makes for interesting conversation and a generous dose of learning.

And that is what it is all about.  So, in that way, it was also a successful week.


References


Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015) Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Upper Saddle River: Pearson