Luciana Podschun's Vocabulary Tree

Since I joined twitter a couple of months ago and started building up my PLN, I became incredibly addicted to it.  I discovered awesome educators and wonderful people who are sharing their experiences, fantastic tools for web 2.0, thoughtful  blogs and interesting discussions all in one place - on “twitter”.

I must confess that besides twitter, I am now also hooked on reading blogs. Little by little I started submitting comments and participating in some of the discussions on twitter such as #eltchat #ntchat# and #edchat. I still don’t feel comfortable enough to start my own blog, but I do love sharing my experiences and writing on other educators’ blogs. So, here I am, I’m writing for the first time as a guest on Kalinago English Blog.

Today, I am sharing an activity which is suitable for all levels and is pretty useful to widen student's vocabulary through its practice, it's called Vocabulary Tree. Once when I was searching on the web for different ways to memorize words I came across to this technique. After reading some other blogs about it, I decided to adopt it for my private students.  I started with my beginner group last month and they really enjoyed it because it’s was a good way to memorize the words.

The overall experience for my students and their initial reaction was great.  The students were thrilled as they realized the interrelation of the different words.  It was good fun for everyone and the students learned in the process. The classes went by very fast!

All we need is to put the subject in the center of the paper.  We can also write a short introduction using as many words related to the subject as we can. Using the introduction we can arrange the main ideas related to the subject in a Vocabulary Tree.

In order to enrich students’ vocabulary we start asking about the ones they know and gradually introduce the new words by asking questions. It’s also a great way to get the students accustomed to the usage of a monolingual dictionary.   We can also add some pictures related to the words for those students who learn better in a visual way.

In the illustration below,  I wrote jobs and occupations in the center of the sheet of paper; with a arrow I put the words which are related and its workplace, so they could learn also the workplace related to the jobs.

I hope you try out this activity, the students get motivated once they learn the interrelation between words. 



Luciana Podschun
@inglesinteract


By the way, I would love to hear from you if you've done something like this too or have any suggestions for me on how to adapt it.