Word building

The idea of the Word Builder page in each month's Spotlight is to focus on words from the wordlists that are particularly useful or interesting in some way. If you make copies and cut out the individual sections of Word Builder each month, you will have a selection of high-frequency vocabulary that you can exploit in several ways. Here's a basic example:

Who it's for:
All levels

What it's for:
Vocabulary building, energy-raising

What you need:
A Word Builder page, copied and cut up into its different squares.

What you do:
Before the lesson, copy and cut up the first page of the Word Builder into its smallest units. Discard the page numbers and set aside the example sentences. You will be left with piles of words, of definitions in English, and of German translations. Depending on the size of your group, one section (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs or phrases) will probably be enough.

Hand out slips of paper (make sure they are now well-shuffled) to your students, one per person in a large class, or two per person in a smaller group.

Students mingle and find the two other partners that make up the three parts — word, definition and translation. Once they have found their group, they should come up with an example sentence using their word.

Do some whole-class feedback on the sentences. Then, if you have access to the magazine, get students to check how the words were used in their original context by scanning the relevant page.

At the end of the lesson or the beginning of the next, dictate the example sentences from the Word Builder page to the whole class, missing out the featured word each time. Students have to complete the sentence with the correct word.

Remember that Spotlight plus offers practice on the Word Builder every month.

Remind your students as often as you can that they need all of this information — spelling, pronunciation, definition, translation and context in order to really know how to use a word.