To get your learners’ eyes back into their vocabulary notebooks and to give them opportunities to speak ‘new’ words and phrases,  try a group revision activity, “From Letter to Word to Sentence”:

Prepare cards with an alphabet letter on each.  You can choose those letters which are frequently the initial letters of the vocabulary words that your learners have been presented.  You will need 3-4 letter cards for each learner or pair of learners you have in class.

For the first round, ask learners to draw a simple 3-column grid at the top of a piece of paper.  Column headings are NOUNS, ADJECTIVES, VERBS,  as in this example:

Pass out a letter card to each learner or pair, ask them to brainstorm any words that begin with the letter they have and to write these words in the appropriate column on their papers. 

Once they have written the words they were able to recall, suggest that they open their vocabulary notebooks and search for more words to write down in their three columns.  Here you will circulate to help them distinguish the parts of speech of each word they find, so that they write them in the correct column.

To extend this part of the activity, here are two suggestions:

(1)   Working on derivatives, if a learner finds or recalls the word ‘beautiful’ and writes it in the ADJECTIVES column, you can suggest that he or she write ‘beauty’ under NOUNS.

(2)   As a learning-to-learn exercise and a third step in this activity, allow learners to browse through their English-English dictionaries to search for one or more words to choose and add to their three columns.

Example:

To report back, ask learners to choose a word from their lists and to write a phrase with their word in it.  [NOTE:  Here we want to practise collocations and correct usage and have learners work with ‘chunks’ of language to aid their memory.]  Call on a few learners to read what they have written to their classmates.  For example, a learner chooses ‘book’ and writes the phrase ‘my blue grammar book’.

For the second round, your learners work in pairs or trios to create original sentences or short texts: narrative or dialogue exchanges.  You can ask them each to choose one word from each of their charts and, together with their partners, write their texts cooperatively, using each partner’s words.  As you circulate, you can encourage, guide and correct any errors you spot.  For example, a pair of learners write the following:  “I was boring because my mother didn’t let my brother and me play on the balcony.”  You ask them to re-write the sentence, replacing ‘boring’ with ‘bored’, and suggest that they add ‘bored’ to their ADJECTIVES Columns.

Learners report back to the entire class, reading their texts or dialogues and receiving applauses, from their peers and from you, for their efforts!