Thursday, June 28, 2007

This week's basic English theme

This week we have been focusing on vocabulary development. I use the unit vocabulary list at the back of the for a list of words for the learners to choose from. I ask them to choose ten words that they were interested in. Then I told them to make sure they were frequently used words. One of the words in the list was undertaker, and I said that, while undertake is in the list of the first 2,000 words, undertaker is not. I suggested that they include undertake as a verb if they were interested.

Then, using data that I found on Rob Waring's page on "Systematic Learning," I suggested that they make cards and start a system of their own. I was particularly interested in the information he had on distributed practice and using sets of 10 vocabulary as a system for learning words. It sounds like a great method, and I will try it with my own Japanese kanji learning.

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