Kupriianova N.N., Senior Teacher of Business foreign languages department

Siberian state aerospace university named after academician M.F. Reshetnev

Types of exercises for teaching vocabulary in pre-intermediate foreign language classes

As practice shows, not all students memorize new vocabulary easily. According to the laws of the memory, a man can forget about 50% of the obtained information after the first presentation. Taking this psychological fact into account, a teacher must organize the work on the new vocabulary in a way that involves a good number of activities to provide maximum repetition of a new word, a possibility of repeated listening to it and using it in speech. Such approach demands from a teacher attention to selection of lexical exercises and organization of the work with the new lexis.

Examining some course books on general foreign language and business foreign language, we meet a great variety of vocabulary exercises:

ü Match the words and phrases to their definitions.

This task is very important as the translation of foreign words doesn’t always reveal their meaning accurately; therefore it is necessary to use the definitions of the new foreign words for clear understanding of their meanings.

This task becomes a bit more interesting if except matching definitions you have to do something else, for example, fill in the missing letters:

ü For every group of words:

a) fill in the missing vowels;

b) match the words to the definitions (a-c):

product	l_ _nch	a) introduction of a product to the market
	l_ f _cycl_	b) set of products made by a company
	r_ng_	c) length of time people continue to buy a product

ü On the stage of revision to motivate the students to study and on the control

stage you can offer your students to do the crosswords in mini-groups against each other, or to prepare the definitions to the words in the given crosswords, and the other group will guess them.

ü Complete the text using the words from the box.

It’s a multiple choice type of exercises. In this task the students see in what context the new words and phrases occur.

ü Match the verbs to the nouns to make common collocations.

ü Put the words into different categories. (Students can check the meaning

and pronunciation of the words at the dictionary or at the mini-dictionary attached to their textbook). For example:

Fruit | Meat | Vegetable | Seafood | Other foods

ü Word-building exercises:

A. Use the correct form of these words to complete the columns of the chart. Use a dictionary to help you.

Noun Adjective Opposite

patience patient ………….

calmness ……………. nervous

………… formal informal

B. Use one of the adjectives or its opposites to complete the following sentences.

С. Then there is a task which supposes using the given words in speech in the form of discussion or answering the questions.

ü Match the words with the pictures or some schemes.

ü Give synonyms (or antonyms).

ü Doing various puzzles is not only useful for memorizing the new words but

also entertaining for the students.

ü Make your own sentences with the given words and phrases.

In addition, I can say that to provide more successful memorization of a new foreign word a teacher can explain to the students its etymology, create a situation in which students will feel the necessity to know this word or offer the students to understand the meaning of a new word from the context themselves and guess its translation.

The analysis of foreign language course books shows that the most common exercises offered by the authors for vocabulary revision are multiple choice exercises and matching. Teachers resort to some other additional exercises, for example, translation exercises (from a foreign language into a mother tongue and vice verse). You can offer your students to make up and write down their own sentences with the new vocabulary. One student reads a sentence in his mother tongue and another student translates it into a foreign language, and then he reads his own sentence in his mother tongue; and the chain continues in this way. In this task students train to use the new vocabulary in sentences and improve their translation skills.

For successful acquirement of the new lexical material it is not enough for the students to do only the exercises given in the Student’s Book or Course Book. In the Workbook or Practice file there are different additional useful tasks which can be done by the students independently at home. Besides, modern course books have a MultiRom with additional interactive grammar and vocabulary activities. It is very important for teachers to draw the students’ attention to the pronunciation of the new words. Sometimes students pronounce the new words incorrectly and, thus, memorize them incorrectly, trying to learn them at home. It is obligatory for the students to put down the pronunciation symbols of the new words, do listening tasks and practice saying the new words after the speaker.

For independent work with the new vocabulary our teachers make online-tests for the students on the University website. At the end of every unit we make a dictation of the wordlist on the topic. A teacher dictates the words in the mother tongue and the students write them down in a foreign language. Here spelling and translation of the words are checked.

Having done a number of lexical exercises for acquaintance with the new vocabulary and its primary acquirement, students start doing different communicative tasks (role plays, discussions, project tasks, etc.) which contribute to a strong acquirement of the lexical skills and development of communication skills.