A mistake I made often early in my language teaching career was to hold the mindset that I set the content, pace and vocabulary that students will learn. It took me awhile, but eventually I learned that it is easy for a teacher to limit students’ vocabulary acquisition. The routine of taking a vocabulary quiz over words in a chapter of Ecce Romani stopped students from straying from the list the chapter provided.
I observed a significant difference in students’ vocabulary acquisition as I considered ways to use ideas from Lee Jenkins’ Optimize Your School. Read more about how I accessed this title for my classroom at this affiliate blog. I discovered that when students have all of the words we hoped to master by the end of a course, many found motivation to learn more words than our target structures. Secondly, regular quizzes that chose 20 of those words moved students to reflect on their progress, set goals and have a better sense of where they were in respect to mastering vocabulary of the target language. There were three critical steps to make progress monitoring of vocabulary knowledge a success:
- Intentional selection of vocabulary to master for each level. This includes root forms but also the specific forms I anticipated to encountered based on required grammar to facilitate the messages students would comprehend.
- Creation of a spreadsheet with every word, any possible morpheme of each word based on expected grammar necessary for comprehension of messages and every possible English definition for each morpheme. Students’ had access to these at the beginning of the course and they used them for their study plans. I also used the spreadsheets to upload words into a quiz in our course management system, Canvas, which selected a random 20 words each time we took the quiz.
- I worked with students’ mindsets about these quizzes. It is important to connect any grade for these to progress and improvement, but ideally, there would not be a grade assigned to these. Either way, there is a need for constant reflection, student conferences and ways for students to monitor their progress. When they have a mindset centered on a certain grade or score; they are more likely to attempt cheating. But I found for most students, tracking their work, focusing the score on improvement coupled with regular short conversations about what I saw from their quizzes was enough to keep them focusing on how many of the words they were able to connect with each 2-3 week period.
Progress monitoring of vocabulary knowledge opened up multiple avenues for acquisition. Students didn’t simply stop at the target structures. Students noticed how Self Directed Reading connected to their vocabulary knowledge. Anytime we completed an activity, they could quickly connect their vocabulary work to the activity. This increased the power of Circling, Partner read with comparison and many other activities. Most importantly; it freed students from the limit of the words, interests and content with which I had connected and made students’ acquisition less dependent upon the instructor.
Comprehensible Antiquity 