"justify"> can be an enjoyable way of revising food or animal vocabulary . The principle of the same type of memory practice can be extended to other vocabulary such as presents in For my birthday I would like .... , wild animals: In the zoo I saw ... , or household object, such as In my cupboard there are .... and word knowledge can be seen as being linked in networks of meaning. The teacher should show the links between vocabulary items so that children learn words in dynamic and meaningful way. For example, if the children learn the word sandwich , this is also a good opportunity to recycle possible types of fillings the children might know, such as jam, ham, or cucumber sandwich, honey, fish, or cheese sandwich, tomato or chicken sandwich, etc. As a follow-up, children can invent different sandwiches and put them on the menu of their coffee shop. Activities like this will illustrate to the children that when they learn a new noun such as sandwich , it can interact with language they already know. This kind of dynamic view makes vocabulary come alive and paves the path to explicit grammar learning.to sort and categorise will practise vocabulary through its organisation in general to specific hierarchy. If food words are being learnt, children can sort real items into vegetables and fruit, naming the individual items as they go.language games also exploit this type of organisation. The game Shipwreck puts pupils into teams with pencil and paper. They are given three minutes to list all the drinks they can think of, then all the food, then all the clothes. Then one of them reads out their list item by item. Teams can only keep items that no-one else has listed. At the end of the game, teams have to imagine themselves landing on a desert island after a shipwreck, with only those items left on their list (usually an amusing selection of odd things).
Extending children s vocabulary beyond the textbook
Most of the textbooks for young learners start with words connected to the family, the house, the school. But children are getting more and more global in their interests through the Internet, television and video, and computer games. Their worlds are much bigger, form much younger ages, than used to be the case. So difficulties in learning vocabulary can arise since the vocabulary is insufficiently connected to pupil s real lives. To extend the vocabulary beyond the textbook, the teacher can give words which are thematically connected to the words give...
