Supporting Learning with Outside Activities A well-balanced language course provides four major opportunities for learning:
learning through input, learning through output, deliberate learning, and fluency
development. The highly structured activities in these books support all four types
of learning opportunities. In addition, learning can further be supported through
the following activities:
1 Have students create vocabulary cards with one word from the unit on one side
of the card and the translation of the word in the student’s first language on the
other side. Students should use the cards for study in free moments during the
day. Over several weeks, students will find that quick repeated studying for brief
periods of time is more effective than studying for hours at one sitting.
2 Assign graded readers at students’ appropriate levels. Reading such books
provides both enjoyment as well as meaning-focused input which will help
the words stick in students’ memory.
3 Practice reading fluency to promote faster recall of word meaning for both sight
recognition and usage. Compass Publishing’s Reading for Speed and Fluency is a good resource for reading fluency material.
4 Include listening, speaking, and writing activities in classes. Reinforcement of
the high-frequency vocabulary presented in this series is important across all
the four language skills.
Author Paul Nation Paul Nation is professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States,
Finland, and Japan. His specialist interests are language teaching methodology and vocabulary learning.
r afraid [afreid]
adj. When someone is afraid, they feel fear.
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