A vocabulary activity: engaging students with words

Reading comprehension and vocabulary teaching

The following vocabulary lesson plan can be done in combination with a reading comprehension activity. The activity tries to engage students cognitively with unfamiliar words they will encounter in a text.

The activity

1. Pick out some key unfamiliar words from the text
2. Ask students to identify the words in the text.
3. Ask students to match the words with an English definition from a dictionary using the context to guess the right answer.
4. Ask students to find antonyms and synonyms using a dictionary.
5. Ask the students to decide whether the words were nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs.
6. Ask students to use the words in sentences.

Follow-up

Finally, students write a short paragraph using these words either as a summary of the text or as a creation of their own.