How To Teach Vocabulary
Guidelines on How to Teach Vocabulary
If you wish to teach vocabulary in a manner that will best benefit your students, make sure they have a firm footing in phonics first. Your students need to be comfortable with how the vowels and consonants are used, in different ways and situations, and vocabulary class will help that.
Three tried and true methods of teaching vocabulary include matching words that are alike, matching opposite words, and using sentences with blanks that the students will fill in.
You can use a type of “advanced” phonics idea when you're working on how to teach vocabulary, as well. You can show a picture followed by three or four words, one of which is the item in the picture/ drawing. Or you can display four drawings and have your students match the drawings to the titles.
Another helpful variation of typical vocabulary tests will list four or five items, one of which does not belong. The student needs to select which word does not fit with the others. In addition, you can have students complete sentences that you start out with a noun and a verb and adjective. They need to choose a word that accurately completes the sentence.
You can also improve how you teach vocabulary by using series of words that the students need to arrange in order, like freezing, cool, warm and hot. This helps students learn the meaning of words that they use in their everyday life.
Students can learn vocabulary by learning to guess the meanings of words from the context in which they appear. You can use a cause and effect sentence, where you highlight the vocabulary words, and help the students to determine what one word means by knowing what most of the other words in the sentence mean. In addition, you can also use opposites in a sentence, and the students can guess or figure out what the new word means because they know the meaning of the other word used in context to it.
Word sheets are probably one of the older methods you will look at when deciding how to teach vocabulary to your students. You and the students will talk about the words on the list, and they can practice meanings and pronunciation, and you can answer your students' questions about the words.
Finally, games are a different way to teach vocabulary, and the students obviously seem to like this method. You can give students cards with situations described on them, and have the students act them out, and let the other students guess what they're portraying. You can make easy crossword puzzles that will help your students enjoy using their vocabulary words to solve the puzzles.
Students can draw pictures and split into two groups, one acting a picture out and the other group guessing what the word is, and then spelling it and using it in a sentence. Knowing how to teach vocabulary is more in-depth than just throwing out words and rattling off definitions and spellings. If it's more like a game, your students may be more eager to learn, and more easy to teach.