7 Practical Tools for Learning, Applying, and Practicing Vocabulary

How many exposures to a word does a learner need to truly acquire new vocabulary? Various studies have attempted to answer this question, with the consensus ranging from seven to 20 exposures. Learning and knowing precede vocabulary acquisition. Learning a word may refer to recognizing a term and its definition, and knowing a word entails understanding its logical relationship with other words. Students also need to know how the word functions in different contexts (Stahl, 2005).

To ensure that vocabulary acquisition can take place, teachers must create the conditions and contexts for repeated practice of new words. At the same time, current best practices in language teaching affirm that a communicative approach yields the best results in language learning. In keeping with that approach, this article shares a mix of web-based tools and highly communicative, student-centered listening and speaking activities that maximize student talk time and foster authentic engagement with high-frequency vocabulary.

One important consideration when creating and adopting tools to facilitate vocabulary learning is to consider the user experience for the student. A great tool is of little use if students cannot easily access it. Therefore, my recommended strategies include free, no-subscription, easy-to-use, and low-tech options.

Before diving into the tools, however, it is important to remember that we must avoid certain fallacies of vocabulary learning. It’s best for teachers to be cautious of statements such as “I taught them that” or “I explained that to them.” Rather, if research suggests that multiple exposures are needed for vocabulary acquisition, the role of the teacher is to create conditions for students to use targeted vocabulary multiple times. But how? 

Target Vocabulary in Speaking Activities

1. Recycle and mine the target vocabulary through guided classroom discussions.

Target words may be instructor selected, text driven, self-selected, or incidental. In other words, create opportunities for multiple exposures to the target vocabulary. If you are not sure which vocabulary to teach or target, you may want to consider Education First’s high-frequency word lists.

Create your own questions or prompts that are centered around the target vocabulary. I like to focus on parts of speech, collocations, context, minimal pairs, spelling, and synonyms/antonyms. For example: 

• • Parts of Speech: How are died, dead, and death different?
  • Collocations: What word usually goes after subtle?
  • Context: What is an alternative to buying plastic water bottles? 
  • Minimal Pairs: Do musicians play violence or violins?
  • Spelling: What is the difference between quit and quiet?
  • Synonyms/Antonyms: What is another word for genre?

These are examples of questions I created for my teaching context. The italicized words are words I wanted my students to engage with and acquire. Use your creativity to generate questions for your specific teaching context. If you don’t feel very creative, you may consider farming the work out to ChatGPT. 

After drafting your discussion questions, an easy way to carry out this activity is through a set of Google Docs (or other word-processing program, or even paper-based handouts, if necessary), using the following steps:

Step 1. Create two Google Docs, with separate sets of your drafted questions in the format of information-gaps.

Step 2. Arrange students into pairs or groups of three.

Step 3. Each student opens a list of questions. One student accesses a doc labeled P1, for example. Another student accesses P2, for instance.

Step 4. Students ask each other the questions on their handouts and engage by listening and speaking, with no written product being necessary. 

The primary goal is for students to engage with the vocabulary in a meaningful way. Using a digital handout (e.g., a Google Doc) allows you to continually refresh the discussion questions, keeping the activity new and engaging. However, if teaching in a context where digital devices may not be accessible, this task can easily be accomplished with paper-based questions.

When students engage with these types of question-and-answer interactions, they are forced to demonstrate the learning objectives you may be targeting. In my teaching context, I want to see if students can “participate in and contribute to social and academic interactions, such as conversations, discussions, and presentations by showing active listening and using verbal and nonverbal strategies appropriate to the context,” as I note in my syllabus. Through this activity, ideally, students are able to remember, understand, apply, and analyze vocabulary, which are important stages in the learning process, per Bloom’s Taxonomy. 

Leverage Online Tools for More Practice

The next five tools take advantage of educational websites designed to provide multilingual learners of English with the opportunity to recycle, revise, and manipulate target vocabulary. Though using these tools requires students to have access to smartphones or other tech devices, the websites are free to access.

2. Encourage students to use digital flashcards with Quizlet. This is a great tool for recall, and because it has a free version, students can use it without having to create an account.

3. Empower students to understand collocations with JustTheWord, a useful website that identifies common collocations in English. This site can help students raise their awareness of common collocations that are corpus based. In fact, according to JustTheWord, raise is one of the most commonly used verbs before the word awareness: 

4. Engage kinetic learners through manipulative tools with Flippity. This is a free website that can be used for many teaching purposes, including to create your own manipulatives. With manipulatives, teachers can easily plug in vocabulary words and ask students to arrange the words based on their parts of speech. Students click and drag the words to make their lists. Here is an example of a manipulative I created for B1-level students¹ who were practicing their top 3,000 words in English: 

The same activity can be prepared offline, using index cards or even sticky notes, in teaching contexts where students may have limited access to the internet.

5. Practice putting vocabulary in context with Wordwall, an online resource where you can create custom activities for your students with a paid version or search for user-created content for free. For example, this is a free activity to practice prepositions of time. Wordwall can also be a great tool for visual learners. In another free activity, students can practice labeling items in a photograph:

6. Take advantage of YouGlish to highlight concrete examples of vocabulary in use. On its homepage, YouGlish is described as an online tool for improving English pronunciation with “fast, unbiased answers about how English is spoken by real people and in context.” Students can access over 100 million annotated YouTube videos. YouGlish is not only useful for pronunciation purposes, but it is an excellent resource to see and hear language being used in short clips in context.

For example, if a student mispronounces the word determine by emphasizing the first syllable instead of the second syllable, the teacher can open YouGlish and type determine into the search bar. Students can then see and hear the word being pronounced with video and captions:

Back to Basics With Vocabulary Games

7. Play a modified version of Taboo, the classic board game. In this version of Taboo adapted for the English language classroom, students describe a target word for their partner to guess; students may not say the target word but are allowed to use the normally “taboo” or forbidden words.

In more advanced classes, students can be encouraged to use adjective clauses and passive voice to enhance their descriptions. For example, in a unit on inventions and innovations, I required students to describe their invention by saying, “This is a device that is used to take photos” (camera). Or, “This is a strong metal that buildings are made with” (steel).   

Taboo is a good activity to do with no technology, whether you use it as a way for students to disengage from screens or in contexts with less access to classroom tech. Simply write the target words on strips of paper.

My students have provided positive feedback on these seven tools for learning, applying, and practicing vocabulary, and I find joy in creating environments for students to know and acquire new words. I hope that some of these resources or approaches to vocabulary acquisition may resonate with your teaching context.

¹ B1 level refers to the lower intermediate or “independent speaker” level of the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR).

References

Stahl, S. A. (2005). Four problems with teaching word meanings (and what to do to make vocabulary an integral part of instruction). In E. H. Hiebert and M. L. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice (pp. 95–114). Lawrence Erlbaum.