Teaching yourself (and other people) vocab!

Goals: 1, To learn how to learn vocabulary on your own. 2. To start thinking about the best ways of teaching lessons to others (you’ll have to do this all throughout this class/ college/ work/ life)

Here is the link to a New York Times article on learning vocabulary.  Many helpful tips!

The most useful way to learn vocabulary is unequivocally by reading– as much as you can (and things you want to read!) These things should be published– not just some rando’s blog on the internet, but they can be song lyrics, magazine articles, whatever.  The more you read, the more vocabulary you’ll learn.

Hip hop is a genre of music that just has a LOT of vocabulary. It’s part of the genre to play with words.  This chart shows you which lyricists have the biggest vocabularies, often inventing their own words.  But hip hop, of course, isn’t the only genre of music you can learn vocab from.  Find the songs you love, whatever genre it’s in, and pick a word you want to know more about.

In-class exercise:

Another good way to learn something is by explaining it to someone else.

(adjectives starting at 1:40) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzThOYEk76k

Make a video like the ones above defining a word. It does not need to be in “standard written English” (it can be slang.) In fact, it doesn’t need to be in English at all.

We’re going to do this in class. You can work with one other person if you want. This doesn’t have to be fancy, of course.  I just want you to think about some interesting way to explain the word!  You don’t need to show your face if you prefer not to.  These should be short. 20 seconds, tops!

You can either:

  • define a word that is new to you (some places to look below) or:
  • define a word that you know that you think other people don’t know (but they need to).

Don’t define a word that everybody already knows. What’s the point in that, right?

So where do I look for a word I don’t know? 

And yes, you CAN use the dictionary!

When you are done, post them on the Open Lab.  If you’re having a hard time posting them, you can email them to me at: chall@citytech.edu.  You just have today’s class period to finish!