vocabulary – Page 2

Bingo

Today I will be sharing a way to play bingo with our students in class using Gemini. Although this game is ideal for lowel levels, it can also be adapted across all levels. As you will see, this tweaked version has more to do with a listening exercise that goes beyond simply identifying words on a bingo card.

Vocabulary flashcards

Vocabulary memorization, retrieval and consistent practice in diverse and meaningful ways are essential for language development and progress. Today we will look at a very practical way to create flashcards to study, memorize and revisit vocabulary using ChatGPT in combination with other digital tools.

Games: Taboo

Today we are going to explore a Gen.AI version of the popular game Taboo. The game is simple (but not always easy to play). Players must describe a target word without using a list of specific ‘taboo’ words that are closely related to it. The goal is for teammates to guess the target word based on the description, but the challenge lies in avoiding the obvious words that would make it easier to guess. If a player uses a forbidden word, they lose the round.

Scaling material down

If our students are struggling with online reading material, they can simply copy and paste it into a Gen.AI tool –I will be using Claude this time- and ask for a simplified, shorter version of it.

Word makeover: from old to new

Today we are going to take a look at a highly productive activity students can do on their own to challenge themselves and play with the language. The idea is to type a sentence into a Gen.AI took –I’ll be using ChatGPT- or ask Gen.AI to generate a random sentence, and then try to replace words in it without altering its meaning.

Vocabulary review

Today I would like to share a highly productive way to revise vocabulary with our students in class. This can work really well as a warmer for the first ten minutes of the lesson. We can select off-the-cuff language items that have cropped up in class, and we can also choose language items from the coursebook.

Mining reading passages for collocations 2

In an earlier post we mined a reading passage from a coursebook series for collocations for the students to do some work around those collocations prior to the reading activity. This time I am going to use the same reading material to share a few ideas on other types of activities that we can take to the language class for the students to do after they have read the passage.

Mining reading passages for collocations 1

Today we are going to ask Claude to generate collocations (clusters of two or three words that commonly appear together in spoken and written English more frequently than they would occur by chance) aligned with reading passages from coursebooks or the web. The aim is to use this material for both communicative activities and raising awareness of collocations before the reading task.

Dice-rolls grid

A dice-roll grid is a table with 6 rows and 6 columns and a total of 36 cells representing the outcome of a roll of two six-sided dice. The 6 rows and 6 columns correspond to each die’s roll. Dice-roll grids are often used in board games and speaking activities in the language classroom. Students roll a die twice to get the coordinates for the task. Gen. AI can create these grids in a split second, ready to be printed or copied and pasted into a digital document for later classroom use.

Chunk chain

This is a variation of the popular language game Word Chain, where players take turns saying words, with each new word starting with the last letter of the previous word. In this Gen.AI-assisted version, students will take turns competing against Gen. AI (this time I will be using Claude) with a focus on language chunks.