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Dictionary activities: Expanding vocabulary
For most people, learning vocabulary in isolation or by rote from an alphabetical list is unlikely to bring success. It is generally accepted that words are easier to remember if they are learned in related groups, with meaningful links established between them. Although the dictionary is an alphabetical list, it can be used as a source for expanding students' vocabulary by providing additional vocabulary which can be linked to familiar words.
Some strategies for increasing vocabulary might be:
- Learning the words for parts of a particular item, or learning associated vocabulary within a topic. Illustrations in the dictionary often provide this related vocabulary. Usage notes often group words of similar meaning together.
- Learning pairs of opposites. Words frequently come up in the same context as their opposites and it can make sense to learn the pairs together.
- Learning new senses of words that are already familiar.
- Learning a group of morphologically-related words (such as an abstract noun, verb, concrete noun, adjective and adverb which all have the same stem).
Below are activities useful for helping your students expand their vocabulary.
Opposites: Elementary
One way of expanding students' vocabulary is to encourage them to build on what they already know by looking at synonyms and opposites.
The 'Opposites' activity worksheet (above) concentrates on opposites.
- Choose some pairs of opposites, particularly those where you think they may know one word but not its opposite.
- Give students one word from each pair and ask them to find the opposite in a wordsearch.
Topic building: Intermediate
The aim of this exercise is to build vocabulary in order to prepare for an essay or other activity on a particular topic.
- Give the class the topic for which they need to build vocabulary, for example driving.
- Working in groups of four, students first spend 5 minutes brainstorming the words they know on the subject. One of the group lists the words as they are said.
- After 5 minutes the group divides up its list, and each member of the group uses the dictionary to hunt for more vocabulary on the topic, using the brainstormed words as a starting point. Useful related words will be found in the definitions, and especially in examples. Starting at the entry for drive in the Oxford Wordpower Dictionary, a student might note down drive to work, go for a drive, a car with four-wheel drive. A cross-reference will also lead to a labelled illustration of a car. The entry for car will give words and expressions such as estate car, hatchback, saloon, park the car, by car/in the car, a car crash. Following up the word crash will give brake and crash into, and so on.
- After 10 minutes, stop the search and ask students to report back to their groups. Students write down any words or expressions that they think will be useful.
- When they have finished, students can mingle with members from other groups and compare lists.
Feelings: Upper-Intermediate
Encouraging students to experiment with new verbs that are more expressive than the usual laugh, say, walk, etc. is a good way of building vocabulary.
- Choose a list of verbs which are connected with expressing how you feel, and write them on the board. Here are some suitable examples: bellow, chuckle, glare, grin, guffaw, freeze, sidle, snap, storm
- The students should then use their dictionaries to put the words into three lists, according to the feeling that they can be used to express: happiness, anger or fear.
- They should then replace the words in bold in the following sentences with words from their lists.
- The whole audience was laughing as though his act was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
- He looked at me furiously.
- 'That's enough from you!' she said in a low voice.
- When the good news was announced we just smiled at each other.
- 'And don't come back again!' he shouted.
- He walked nervously onto the stage.
- We all laughed at her little joke.
- She gave him a furious look and walked out of the room.
- I stopped in mid stride as a dark figure appeared out of the shadows.
KEY
happiness: grin, chuckle, guffaw
anger: bellow, snap, storm
fear: sidle, freeze
- The whole audience was guffawing as though his act was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
- He glared at me furiously.
- 'That's enough from you!' she snapped in a low voice.
- When the good news was announced we just grinned at each other.
- 'And don't come back again!' he bellowed.
- He sidled nervously onto the stage.
- We all chuckled at her little joke.
- She gave him a furious look and stormed out of the room.
- I froze in mid stride as a dark figure appeared out of the shadows.
More meanings: Advanced
An interesting way of expanding students' vocabulary is to introduce them to additional meanings of words that they already know.
- A good way of doing this is to take a group of words from a particular topic area, for example, animals.
- Give students 2 sets of clues which they can use to guess the words.
- The easy set of clues are the straightforward definitions of the animals. The harder clues are definitions of different senses of the same words.
- Encourage students to cover the easy animal clues and try to guess the words from the harder alternative clues first, and to check their answer in the dictionary before looking at the easy clues for confirmation. Look at the 'More meanings' worksheet (above) in which the shaded letters form the name of another animal.
- Extend the activity by asking students to work in groups and use their dictionaries to create similar quizzes for each other, with two possible clues for each word. Give each group a different selection of words. You could choose from the following, all animals or birds which also have other meanings: ape, calf, chicken, crane, dog, duck, kid, mole, monkey, parrot, seal, stag, swallow, wolf.
Related title
Oxford Wordpower Dictionary, Third Edition
Source
Oxford Teacher’s Club:
http://www.oup.com/elt/teachersclub/articles/expand_vocab?cc=gb
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