Helping children to become independent vocabulary learners
In class, we can only help our students learn a limited number of words, and we need to make sure those words are continuously consolidated and recycled. For some children that will not be enough, for some it might be almost too much and they will need additional practice. Learning should continue outside the classroom. It is therefore important that the children's approach to learning vocabulary is pro-active. If they develop an effective system of recording and practising words and chunks, and if they seek opportunities to learn new words in the world around them instead of just waiting for us to supply daily doses of vocabulary, they will have a much better chance of learning enough words to be able to communicate in English confidently even at primary school.
So how can we help them become more autonomous?
In this forum, we are going to share ideas. Everyone will come up with one idea and start a conversation about it. Please read everyone's ideas and react to them. You may have experience with some of them, and if not, you may hypothesize about why or why not such an idea might work.
Example: You will start a theme called 'Phonemic transcription'. You will describe what you mean, for example, if the children know how to transcribe at least the difficult sounds that we don't have in Czech, such as schwa or 'the' and so on, they can write words down independently, which makes it possible for them to record even words that other students are not noting down. The others will then read your contribution and write additional notes, ideas, opinions, anecdotes, experience, possible drawbacks...
The themes can be concerned with motivation, ways of recording vocabulary, ways of encouraging children to practice words in alignment with their learning styles, ways of engaging children in displaying new words in the classroom, teaching new words to each other, and so on.
There are six of you, so we are going to have six themes, and later I will then open another thread where we can suggest even more.
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