Vocabulary learning = Vocabulary sticking

While I am in the middle of this TAGs process, which I am finding so time consuming, I decided to have a break and reflect on T&L, especially on how we make sure that students learn and most importantly, remember vocabulary over time.

Vocabulary is key, not just for the productive skills but also for the receptive ones. In my experience, those students who know the most vocabulary are always the ones that perform the best in public examinations. 

How can we make sure students learn and widen their vocabulary repertoire? These are some practical ideas that work for me and my students.

Making productive vocabulary stick

I think it is important  to establish the difference between productive and receptive vocabulary. 

This is interesting as the current MFL Content proposals advocate for not such a distinction. I think this is a mistake. In my lessons, we use Sentence Builders. Depending on the Year group, we can spend up to 6 weeks working on a particular Sentence Builder at KS3 or about two weeks at KS4. Below an example of a Y10 SB.

This is the productive lexicon that I expect students to know inside out and use confidently by the end of a unit in oral and written tasks. To achieve this goal, modelling and practice of the structures in lessons are key but also vocabulary/structures learning. Every Sentence Builder is linked to different sets of Quizlets for KS4 or Memrise for KS3. These courses use the structure of the Sentence Builder so, sometimes students learn words, but others a whole chunk, like in the example above. Learning the whole chunk “no había hecho nada”, helps students to embed the structure into the long term memory and later in the course to manipulate it, when we spot patterns, for example by inferring "they had done nothing"  ("no habían hecho nada". However, by learning the chunk, from day one, students can use the Pluperfect tense fluently while we plant the seed for the use of another tense.

Students learn the Sentence Builders as homework tasks only after these have been extensively practised in lessons and we test this learning via quick vocabulary tests. These tests are carried out weekly and are marked by the students themselves. They always involve testing from English into Spanish, regardless of ability, and consist of 10 chunks or small sentences created from combining bits from the sentence builder, rather than testing individual words!

For example: That day I was worried because I had failed my exam

To help students learn the sentence builder vocabulary, in context, so that they can create sentences from it, I combine the use of Quizlet with Textivate. 

Textivate is a great tool which allows students to practise structures, hence learning them, via the creation of short sentences and/or paragraphs, encouraging them to treat vocabulary and grammar (lexicogrammar) as part of a continuum, which reduces cognitive load and improves fluency. In Textivate the teacher creates their own activities based on their own texts and/or words or chunks. In my case, students work on their Textivate activities either in lessons or as homework as a tool to learn vocab! Textivate example on vocabulary of Environment Y11

Created by Martin Lapworth (the creator of Textivate and TaskMagic) in conjunction with Gianfranco Conti, the SentenceBuilders site is another great way to help students learn our Sentence Builders! In this site, you can select pre populated Sentence Builders, or create your own one, extremely easily, and select assignments for students, based on a wide range of activities aimed to help them learn and memorise key structures, integrating skills such as listening, reading or translation! The range of activities available is impressive and include all the favourite activities from the EPI teaching pedagogy. I use this site, like Textivate, in the classroom but also as homework tasks to help students.  Please, click on Jerome Nogues’ video to see a review of this new site and how to navigate it.

Functional versus Content vocabulary

By functional vocabulary I mean essential structures that come over and over again and we want our students to master from day one but also, great “high impact” expressions that we introduce as from Y7 and we recycle through the whole language learning journey in all contexts, so they stick! 

“Me hace sentir bien” “me gustaría que mi madre fuera” “me ayuda a relajarme” “si pudiera me gustaría” “suelo” “puede ser “ “puedo” “después de” “nos gusta” “le gusta” “iba a” “quería”  are some of these structures, to mention a few. It is important, when designing the curriculum, to decide on our Functional Vocabulary/Structures to ensure that they are introduced little by little, in as many Sentence Builders as possible from Y7 to Y11. These structures normally involve giving opinions, justifying or sequencing ideas. This ties up with Elena Díaz’s 20 Keys nicely. 

By content vocabulary I mean specific topic vocabulary, although, this must also be recycled in different contexts as much as possible! 

Retrieval Practice

For structures/vocabulary to stick, they need to be encountered many times, experts say a minimum of 6 times. Students may score 20 out of 20 in a vocabulary test. However, we have all experienced the situation that weeks later such vocabulary has partially or totally been forgotten. Here comes the power of retrieval practice and interleaving topics. This requires careful planning into a SoW but also from the teacher in their day to day lessons. 

How can we incorporate structures from two weeks ago or a month ago in our lessons, mixed up with new material? This can be done in the shape of starter activities where students need to recall old vocabulary, hence helping them to transfer information to their long term memory using Retrieval Grids for example, but also by incorporating such structures in our main planned activities for a lesson. For example when carrying out an information gap activity, during the Practice Stage of learning, students may  be required to talk about past topics at the same time as practising structures from current ones. When modelling new structures I always include content from past topics! 

Carousel Learning is great for this! Carousel Learning is another tool, which you populate with your own questions (or sentences in the case of languages) from all topics, via a spreadsheet. The tool allows you to create mini quizzes whose content you select from your range of topics and questions previously downloaded into the site. Doing this for homework and/or in the classroom is a powerful retrieval practice tool, as you can include a selection of sentences from as many past topics as you want!

Key questioning via short oral quizzes with the use of mini whiteboards is also powerful for retrieval practice and learning vocabulary and structures for the students, while it allows teachers to check for understanding at a glance, see strengths and where there are gaps, to inform your planning accordingly. When doing these quizzes, I always use sentences, so students are forced to use structures in context and mainly translations from English into Spanish. 

Receptive Vocabulary and being independent

How can we tackle this? From Y7 I ask students to create their own Memrise or Quizlet courses for each topic, which we call “My random vocabulary”. Every piece of vocab that appears in reading, listening activities, past papers or pre populated sites such as Languagenut or This is Language, my students add it to their Random Quizlet/Memrise sets.

Every so often students are given the opportunity to learn this vocab. They choose what to learn so the vocabulary/structures vary from student to student, which gives them independence and autonomy. Normally, I don’t expect students to produce this vocabulary in writing and speaking tasks, but to recognise it in a reading or listening situation. 

However, many of my students transfer much of this vocabulary to the production category as they choose to use it over and over again in oral or written tasks. This is my ultimate goal: to encourage students to be independent, learn their own vocabulary and reuse it freely. 

It is not an easy task at all but it can be achieved! Of course, especific exam boards Quizlet vocabulary sets fall into this category too. I also create Quizlet courses with the most used expressions that I can spot in the reading and listening GCSE papers.  This has made a huge difference in some of my low attainer students when facing the Reading and traditionally difficult Listening exams.

Discussing strategies!

Finally, although it should be on the top of the list, we must discuss learning strategies with students and teaching them how to learn! I use lot of technology but I have to recognise that some students will not like that approach and I need to give them alternatives.

The looking, saying, covering and repeating method can work extremely well with students as well as creating their own physical flashcards. It is important to have a departmental strategy to learn vocabulary and as Danielle Warren does, to send such a strategy to parents so they can also be involved in the learning of their children. We are planning to do so as from September! 

By applying these strategies and learning vocabulary in context (lexicogrammar approach) with the use of technology and planning/interleaving its practice, students learn vocabulary and this starts becoming sticky! 

15 Onenote Tips to maximise your students' learning experience and SAVE YOU TIME!

I love Onenote. It is such as great tool that allows me to carry out blended learning seemingly, saves me time, allows me to connect with my students easily and to bring my teaching to the 21st century. 

Most importantly, Onenote helps me take my subject, MFL, outside the classroom and maximise the learning experience of my students outside my four teaching walls! 

Ultimately, Onenote contributes to develop independent learning skills in my pupils, my ultimate goal!

On this post, I am assuming, you know how to create a Class Notebook within Onenote and you have one already set up. This post will focus on how to use your Onenote once this has been created by sharing with you my 15 top tips.

1. Think carefully on how you are going to structure your Content Library. 

Ideally, this should be a departmental approach. How many sections are you going to create? What will be their names? This should match your teaching methodology and Schemes of Learning/Work. In my case, I have a section for each topic I teach called: Lessons + name of topics, another section for Grammar, Blooklets, Sentence Builders, Revision Work and Subscriptions to external sites, such as Languagenut, This is Language, The Language Gym or my Quizlet folder. See my example below. 

Remember that the Content Library cannot be edited by students but anything in it can be seen by them, so if you do not want to release the content of a lesson, I would advise you to store it in the Teacher Only section of your Onenote, just below the Content Library.

2. Have a page for each week's lessons. Within my lesson sections, I create a page for a week's worth of lessons rather than a page per lesson. Sometimes there is too much content so I create a second page for an individual lesson and make it a subpage of the main week. This way, it is easy to find your lessons and it minimises your work considerably!  I store my lessons in the Teacher Only section and paste it in the Content Library when I want to distribute them to students.

3. Have a template for your lessons which you can store in the Teacher Only section. In my case the template includes a picture of my Interactive Classroom, which I created using Canva, which personalises my Onenote and makes it more colourful and attractive!

4. Populate the sections of your Content Library, little by little, with reference materials that support your subject, treating it as an area for the ultimate independent learning experience for your students!  What will your students need to support their learning and provide scaffolding? In my case it is grammar explanations, links to sample oral questions, oral booklets, translation booklets, our Sentence Builders with direct links to Quizlet courses. Any materials/booklets you would give to students, can go here, including self-assessment areas! You will save lots of time and paper in photocopying! Think of this section as the door to Independent Learning and teach your students to use it and become independent. TOP TIP What about using this area for your own video tutorials on modelling or explaining a difficult concept? You can use LOOM.

5. Use your Onenote as your teaching planning tool! I don't use a Teacher Planner anymore, as my lesson plans are in my Onenote: per week, per group, with all links to PPTs, Word Documents, external links to quizzes, Youtube Videos... It saves me time as all is in one place, which anyone in the department can share, so you can reuse each other's resources by tweaking content to match individual classes. Most importantly, you can reuse lessons from previous years too just by copying and pasting your old pages.

6. Use Page Colour when populating your page and different fonts/bolding/highlighting bits to make your lesson content attractive to learners. I also, advise you to use the Tags option on Onenote for students/you to tick tasks which have been accomplished, or classify tasks within a particular skill. MAKE YOUR LESSON ATTRACTIVE!

7.Remember that any Microsoft file will embed into your Onepage, as well as some external files, such as Genially or Youtube videos. That will make your lesson interactive and will allow your students to access such material nicely during your lesson and outside the classroom!

In the case of URL based material, such as MS Forms or Youtube videos, just copy and paste the URLs into your Onenote. In the case of MS files, just Go to Insert, file, choose your file and then, "Upload to Onenote and insert link".  

TOP TIP  Take advantage of this opportunity and think outside the box! You can also Insert external Links, as well as links within pages in your Onenote (remember the Content Reference Library?), so an opportunity to think outside the box: How can you use other external apps such as LearningApps, Flippity, Wheel of Names, Quizziz or Genially to maximise learning? I add links to all these apps directly to my Onenotes. I explain how I exploit these apps in blended learning in this blogpost.

8. Use the Snipping Tool app to select sections of a textbook, website etc.. that you want students to work on and paste the content onto Onenote. I use this all the time and it is extremely useful for a particular reading or listening activity!

9. TOP TIP!! If you want students to respond to questions, etc.. Create a Table for them to write answers on. Look at my example above, where I pasted a section of a digital textbook into Onenote with Snipping Tool, for a reading task, and then created a Table for students to write their answers in. I always change the colour of my Table to make it stand out!

10. Do not reinvent the wheel! Use all your PDFs, Word Worksheets interactively in Onenote. For that, just insert them but, instead of choosing the option shown in Tip 7, choose "Insert as printout". This will insert a copy of your document as an image (an image per page). Once this is done, right click on your image and set it as background. That way, students can either write on it directly, with a digital pen, or just type their answers! This is very useful in the case of Exampro materials, where students just type in their answers directly into the worksheet. 

11. Give feedback by Inserting an Audio, or ask students to give you oral answers to questions! This will save you lots of time when Marking!!

12. Use the Stickers within Onenote to provide feedback! They are under Insert and you can add your own text. Once created, you can save your sticker in the Teacher Only section to use later! 

TOP TIP  use the Windows+V option to access your clipboard of copied images when marking, which allows you to find your recent copied feedback stickers, for example, and just paste them when marking, without having to go to the Teacher Only section to find the sticker you need! Why don't you try to use your Bitmoji as a sticker for Feedback? See example above too. 

This is my presentation from a TILT Webinar a delivered last March on Feedback using Onenote, with lots of tips!

13. Distribute your pages to your students weekly, that's why I tend to create a page of lessons per week, so I only need to distribute one page per teaching set. This means that students get a version of your distributed page in their own section for them to edit and work on. 

TOP TIP if you make a mistake or change your lesson plan, you can delete a distributed page easily and you can also distribute pages to particular students!

14. Use the Review Student Work function when marking. This is under Class Notebook on the top of your onenote and it allows you to go through work really quickly! It only works with pages that you have distributed, not created by students, so if you want to use this function, make sure you distribute the page where you want students to work. In my case, it will be their lesson page.

15. Finally! When setting up your Class Notebook, think about the sections you want to see in your students' areas.  Structure this for them and explain to them how they are going to work, which sections to use for what and the rationale behind! In my case, I have a section for each topic (lessons), a section for Sentence Builders and a section for Prep/Homework. Students can always create their own independent sections, which I encourage them to do, but with a rationale. However, you can only distribute pages to previously created sections by you.

For a video demonstrating these tips this is my Onenote Tutorial 

ENJOY ONENOTE AND THE BLENDED LEARNING EXPERIENCE IT PROVIDES!