Hey all! I hope everyone has been staying warm this week! I'm right in the middle of the polar-vortex and have been experiencing sub-zero temperatures for a few days, and I'm over it! Today I had a group of international ESL instructors visiting my class for an observation. They're here with the US State Department to learn more about ESL instruction in the US. We had a great time, and I hope to write more about the experience soon! One thing we discussed during observation today was a vocab knowledge exercise I do with my class. This exercise is fairly common in my department (all of my students were already familiar with it), but it was new to my international observers, so I thought I'd share it with you! Click below to open the file. When you open it, you see four different categories of vocabulary knowledge, covering how well a student knows a word. The goal of this chart is to have students self-assess their vocabulary knowledge. It's important to stress to students that their chart will always look different from someone else's and that there is no good or bad chart. I also point out that it's totally okay to have never encountered some of the words before! I usually insert the vocabulary words from the chapter we're reading in the textbook, or a selection of Academic Word List vocab and have them complete the chart before we start doing any reading or discussing definitions. After filling out the chart, I let them mingle with each other to share their vocabulary expertise (they always have a lot of fun doing this!). Finally, I have students fill out the chart again at the end of the unit/lesson so see if their comfort with the vocabulary has changed at all. Most students report moving at least one category to the right for each word (increasing their knowledge of those words), and overall have a positive experience with this self-assessment activity.
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AuthorWritings from an ESL instructor at a Big Ten university in the Midwest. Archives
October 2019
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