Word-set exercises for contextualising vocabulary via imagined possible worlds¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Word-set exercises are open-ended puzzles in which learners infer the intended reader, topic and purpose of a letter from lists of presented words, imagining 'possible worlds' that contextualise the lexis and accessing relevant schemas and registers. The teacher elicits and challenges justifications for unusual choices while the class acts as a jury on their feasibility, generating oral practice with puzzle value. They develop awareness of the shifting meanings and style values words take in differing contexts.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• They assume the declarative base, the provisional definition, has been fixed in place first, for example through completion of definition frames

Constraints¶

• There are no absolutely correct answers; the exercises depend heavily on teacher elicitation

Target Learners¶

• orientation-year university students, e.g. engineering and business students at the University of Bahrain; adaptable to beginners via odd-one-out variants

Target Learning Goals¶

• sociolinguistic awareness of register and context
• purposive reading strategies
• oral production through justifying choices

Related Strategies¶

• Paraphrase exercises using general basic words to assimilate meaning
• Word-net exercises linking lexical knowledge to grammatical awareness

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Robinson, Peter J. (1988). Procedural and Declarative Knowledge in Vocabulary Learning: Communication and the Language Learner's Lexicon. Paper presented at the 22nd Annual TESOL Convention, Chicago. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED296585