Teaching Vocabulary

Its easy to get stuck using the same tired old methods of teaching vocabulary, so its worth reading up a little on different approaches and activities to raise your awareness of some other options you could adapt to your lessons.

Vocabulary is vital to successful communication and will also allow your students to access a wider range of materials and stimulus (authentic readers, videos, newspapers, magazines) which will increase the pleasure of learning, and using, a language.

It could be argued that using the correct words in a sentence without any grammatical structure at all could still lead to a successful interaction. 

For example compare,  'airconditioning, leak' to 'house, problem'.  I know I have survived many challenging situations in foreign countries using this method!

Students at school should be aiming to acquire at least 400 new words a year.  Doing so with the ability to not only recognise these words, but produce them correctly in written and spoken exchanges will require the teacher resorting to a variety of methods and sufficient repetition beyond the odd game of hangman!

Here are a few useful links for teaching vocabulary.

http://www.increasevocabulary.net/make-words-relevant.html

http://buildvocabulary.org/index.php

http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/vocab/strategies.html

Do you have any good ideas or useful resources for teaching vocabulary?