I often ask learners to write example sentences using new vocabulary. This helps them remember, clarifies meaning and collocation, and focuses on usage. However, I find that just telling my learners to write examples is too open and so often unsuccessful, so I always give them a topic to write about. This topic could be related to learning aims or be something that learners are thinking about in their daily lives, such as a recent news item. This can also prompt more discussion – and so more practice of the target language.
By Paul Kaye
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patrisius
Good idea. In line with The Output Hypothesis, but instead of focusing on the syntactic accuracy, this technique gets the students to attend to collocations and recall. I did a small research on this and the result was promising.
anaumoska
Hi Paul,
I have noticed in my classes that using this technique as a way of learning (or even better 'strengthening') the vocabulary for a certain unit makes students wonder what kind of sentences they should make (affirmative, negative or interrogative), should they be short or long, etc. In other words, when telling them to put a word in a specific sentence they lose focus and start asking unimportant questions not connected to the word itself! This led me to search for better ways of learning new vocabulary, and I came up with the idea of writing four words on the board (words that are new to them and have all been mentioned in the one specific lesson), which they should not yet write down in their notebooks (concentrating on the visual aspect of the word at this point). I then read a fill-in-the-gap sentence which contains a blank that they must fill in with one of the words on the board. But try not to forget to make the four words on the board similar in meaning, otherwise the activity would be too easy for them! In most cases in my experience they do make the right choice of word, but they think about it for a moment! Afterwards I dictate the sentence out to them, they write it down with the correct word, and after that they should write three other sentences (for the remaining three unused words in separate sentences). It is at this point that the hard part of the activity is to create 3 totally different sentences using the three words that are left, but to follow the first example and to make the meaning of the new word clear in each sentence.
Now this will get them thinking!
Best, Aneta Naumoska
brenbrennan
Yes, Ss sometimes get stuck for inspiration when making a personalised sentence.
I had continued success with a TOEFL group by adopting a "Theme of the session for the personalised sentence". This did not have to be related to the lesson content.
For example, one day Ss had to write the sentence relating to 'summer holidays'. Another day it was 'winter'.
'Things I do at the office', 'Stuff I do at the weekend', 'Favourite films and actors' were other themes of the day.
This focus seemed to be a faster way of forcing a personalised sentence out of Ss.
...and they all got the TOEFL scores they needed in the end :-)