I've commonly found that although learners are able to remember words and their meanings, they still have problems when they actually try to use the words in a sentence. This activity highlights the problem and helps to move learners' basic knowledge of a word's definition to being able to use it correctly in different contexts.
Preparation
Collect together a list of words your learners have learnt recently and some short definitions of each word. Draw a large grid on the board. The size will depend on the number of learners you have, but limit to a maximum of 20, as they may start to lose concentration with anything bigger.
Procedure
- Read out one of the definitions and see if the learners can remember the word. As learners guess the words write them up on the board in one of the spaces on the grid. You can make this stage more competitive by putting learners into groups and awarding points.
- Keep reading out definitions and getting the learners to guess the words until the grid is completely full of words. Then put the learners into pairs or small groups and ask each group to choose two of the words from the grid. Try to make sure that each group has different words and that as many of the words as possible from the grid are chosen.
- Once the groups have chosen their words, tell them that they must write a single sentence that uses both words and that you will award points for the most interesting sentences. At this point, it's better to focus them on the creativity rather than the accuracy of the sentences.
- Once all the groups have written their sentences you could either get a volunteer to write each sentence on the board, or read the sentences out. At this point, you should award points for their creativity and interesting use of the words.
- Try to involve the class in voting for the sentences that they like the most and awarding points. You could even make this more fun by having number cards for you or the learners to hold up, giving marks out of ten.
Follow up
- Once this is done you can then look at the sentences again to see how grammatically accurate they are and how appropriately the learners have used the words. Particular things to look for are correct collocations and the appropriate degree of formality, etc.
- Try to get the learners to check each other's work and see if they can correct any errors. You may like to award extra points if they can find and correct errors in their peers' work.
Another approach to correction that I've tried is collecting the sentences and looking at them closely myself. Instead of correcting them though, I write up a list of collocations or grammar rules that have been 'broken' and then give them back the sentences together with the rules so that the learners can find the errors and try to apply the rules themselves.
This is a variation on an activity that I first saw in a book called A Way with Words by Stuart Redman and Robert Ellis.