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