My Traffic Light Vocabulary Approach…
Heute lesen wir eine Geschichte. – Today we are reading a story.
For those of you who were at Sport today, we read “Tim ist Tom” and did the exercises on the following page in your photocopied workbooks. The audio to this story is available on this blog page.
Words as Traffic Lights:
Words can be…
- friends – words you know well enough to use in conversation
- acquaintances – words that you recognize and understand but can’t really use yet
- strangers – words that you neither use nor recognise
Your aim is to turn the strangers into acquaintances and the acquaintances into friends. This applies even in English, but is far more urgent when learning a foreign language.
To achieve this, you need to revise steadily and frequently, e.g. by working through the class wikis, writing lists of words, making up your own sentences and even working through my Tiny Cards sets. All of these tasks will help you turn the words you know into “friends” that trip off your tongue easily, rather than hiding themselves in the recesses of your mind.
Recommended Methods of Revision:
- Make lists based on the Wikis on the blog, which summarise everything we have covered this term.
- Create sets of questions and answers on various topics.
- Work through my sets of Tiny Cards and those of other teachers.
- Complete all the tasks under each unit on the blog. Our current unit is HERE.
- Work through Duolingo.
- Make up short texts and show them to me.
- Speak to me or to friends in German – even a short conversation helps to seal vocabulary in your memory.
- Never say something in English if you can already say it in German. You can already say things like: “Wie geht es dir?” — “Danke, gut” — “Hast du einen Spitzer?” — “Oh nein, wir haben Mathe, das finde ich blöd” — “Doch, ich mag Mathe sehr!”
