Building up vocabulary for writing tasks

           
A successful piece of writing has many ingredients, one of the key ones being choice and range of vocabulary. Annie Altamirano has plenty of ideas to help our Secondary students brighten up their written work.

Producing a coherent, fluent, extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult skill to master in a language, even in the first language. Added to this is the fact that most adolescents find it boring or believe they just can’t write anything decent. They get frustrated when they lack vocabulary to complete a writing task successfully. While their passive vocabulary may be quite extensive, their active vocabulary is often much more limited and they end up using the same words again and again: people always walk or run, people and objects are pretty or beautiful and something they like doing is nice. And that’s it! Here are a few activities that can be used to help them build up their active vocabulary.

1. Describing people

a. Character.

                    
Brainstorm on the board adjectives beginning with each letter of the alphabet. If you feel students are going for the most common ones, give definitions and ask them to say the adjective: ‘Someone who always says ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ is ….?’ If any letters are missing, ask students to use dictionaries and look up more adjectives and provide a simple definition. Have them keep a written record in their notebooks.

Then play a game. The first student begins by saying: ‘I like my friend Albert because he is amiable’, the second follows: ‘I like my friend Betty because she is brilliant’, and so on.

b. Ways of moving

                 
Ask students how many words they know that describe different ways of walking. They will probably come up with run, walk, jump and little else. Write a few verbs to describe other ways of walking on the board, such as sprint, stroll or leap and ask the students to mime them if they know (or think they can guess) the meaning, or mime the verb yourself and help them to produce a simple definition in English they can remember easily.

For revision, give students blank cards and ask them to work in groups. One group should work with verbs of movement, another with adjectives that describe character.  Have them write a set of definitions and the set of words on separate cards. Groups then exchange the cards and match the pairs.

This activity can be done with other lexical sets too, such as ways of speaking (shouted, whispered, grumbled, etc). As a consolidation task, ask students to look for pictures or photographs of people in magazines, newspapers or on the Web and write a vivid description of this person. Describe how they move, feel, speak, etc. This can be done in class as a writing workshop. In groups, students read each other’s descriptions, comparing them to the actual picture and helping each other improve the texts. Then they exchange descriptions and pictures with another group, read the texts and try to match them to the corresponding pictures.

2) Describing places

               
To stimulate students’ imaginations when writing a narrative that requires description, try modelling the narrative as if you were telling the story and eliciting enriching elements from them.

Suppose they have to write a story about what happened to them one evening when their car broke down in the middle of nowhere. You could begin like this: ‘One day, you were driving along a deserted country road. The sun was beginning to set and the sky was …. What colour was it? Yes, red, but what kind of red? Bright red? There was no traffic and the nearest village was … Where was the village? Near? Far away? How far was it? Suddenly the car began to slow down and eventually it stopped. You tried to switch on the engine again but nothing happened. How did you feel?

Build up the story together by encouraging them to add interesting details and helping them with new vocabulary. It is a good idea to write the contributions on the board classifying words into categories, e.g. verbs, adjectives and nouns. Afterwards, you can ask them to write their version of the story in groups.

Another approach is to make copies of a short narrative or description omitting all verbs and adjectives and numbering the blank spaces. In pairs or groups, students fill in the missing details. If you would like to make it easier, you can provide two or three options from which they can choose. Depending on the kind of text and the level of the students, you can decide to supply options or not. When they have finished, you can give them the original text to compare and discuss the differences and / or similarities between the two.

3) Cool sounds

            
You can do this as a game to explain what the rhythm of a text is and how the choice of words can affect this rhythm. Provide a list of words and ask the students to say them aloud and choose three or four they like the sound of most. For example: murmur, hush, dribble, lullaby, mist, bobolink, marigold or cobblestone.  

Then, ask them to write six words, not from the list above, that they think sound beautiful. Allow them to use dictionaries. As a class ask them to share their words with their classmates. As a follow up, they can write a short story or a poem using their words.

Finally, it is a very good idea to display the students’ written work either in the classroom, in common school areas or on a class web page. This gives the writers a sense of audience and of ‘being published’. Their work is no longer just a piece of homework that has to be done to please the teacher. There is a sense of purpose to it. And, who knows? You may discover a potential professional writer in your class.

Annie Altamirano is a teacher and teacher trainer. She teaches at Idiomas Anatole France in Madrid.