Learning clothes vocabulary
Summary
With the help of digital tools, set up an interactive learning environment in your classroom and boost self-paced learning! Piret from Järveküla School, uses multiple digital tools to teach fashion and clothing vocabulary and combine summative and formative assessment. She can easily create lots of practice questions that students can answer anytime anywhere.
Keywords
Formative assessment, summative assessment, vocabulary, English language
Quick reference
Context
Piret Lehiste from Järveküla School in Estonia has adapted a national curriculum subtopic to a self-paced class activity with formative assessment. She uses online quiz and brainstorming tools to address the English as a foreign language (EFL) topic “Me and others”. This includes introducing oneself, describing one’s feelings, people’s appearance, and everyday activities.
Online quiz tools such as Quizlet and Quizizz enable students to learn and practice new material anytime and anywhere using their own devices. These are also good examples of gamified learning; they provide many features to make feedback and tracking results fun. They also enable self-paced learning to encourage students to do practice questions on their own.
The activity
The class begins with brainstorming, using AnswerGarden; a simple tool for creating word clouds for brainstorming and mind mapping (Figure 1). The teacher asks students to write down 3 clothing items that students already know in English. Piret uses Google Classroom to share the link to the brainstorming activity, but teachers can use any other means of quickly sharing links and other material (e.g. Padlet).
Figure 1 A word cloud activity as seen by the student on AnswerGarden.
Students then start learning clothes and fashion vocabulary with the help of Quizlet flashcards. They can use a “learn mode” in Quizlet to practice new vocabulary (example). No login is needed. Students see the picture and the word in their mother tongue for the cloth item for which they need to find the English word.
After some practice, teacher Piret splits the classroom into groups of 3 to work collaboratively on a Quizlet live game. This adds some competitiveness and gamification to the class: students can name their teams and compete while also tracking their progress on a scoreboard (see a tutorial in English). This works great for developing students’ collaboration skills, because although students use individual devices, they need to coordinate within their teams to win.
It is also possible to do a Quizizz quiz in ‘Homework’ mode. The link can be shared in Google Classroom, MS Teams or any other dashboard. The teacher can post the personal quiz results of each student in the dashboard of the digital platform (Figure 2).
Figure 2 A quiz results card for an individual student on Quizizz.
The practice tests help the teacher to understand whether students are ready for the next step - forming sentences with new vocabulary items (e.g., describe what people are wearing in the picture or in the classroom). If there are frequently occurring mistakes across the classroom, teacher Piret can address them at this moment. If some students are lagging in their practice, she can help them out in person. If some are performing outstandingly well, she can adapt the difficulty of upcoming challenges for them.
The initial brainstorming activity can trigger the students’ curiosity as well as re-activate background knowledge. However, if students are very young or do not know enough words on a certain topic, the task might not be as effective as expected. An alternative way could be to encourage students to discover new key words independently starting from their mother tongue and using an online dictionary (e.g. ninjawords.com).
Finally, students can take the same practice test as homework. This kind of vocabulary practice is followed by sentence production activities in which students start using new vocabulary in their own sentences (describing someone’s clothes or what they are wearing, etc.).
The use of technology in this scenario does not replace the teacher but supports the learners with further practice opportunities that can be done in the classroom or assigned for homework as individual tasks. All activities are suitable for face-to-face contexts as well as hybrid, blended or full online settings.
Both Quizizz and Quizlet flashcards are suitable for blended learning and distance learning contexts. Both tools integrate games that can be played individually or in teams. This adds fun and challenge to formative assessment and online learning. Moreover, Quizizz can be used for individual formative and summative testing as it allows printing out the students’ tests and share them via mail.
The scenario can be adapted also to full online or hybrid learning settings. In case of remote learning, it is essential for students to clearly understand what they must do. The teacher can give precise instructions with references to sources on the class learning management system. Students can refer to these in case they have doubts or get stuck. Feedback can be delivered by the teacher also through a short video or a podcast with instructions to accompany students throughout the tasks. A useful option is also to create learning pathways with the help of aggregator tools such as Padlet, Wakelet, Tes Teach Blendspace or Hyperdocs on which teachers can collect all studying resources and add instructions, vocal messages, short videos, tips for learning, extra materials, etc.
Outcomes and lessons learned
Teacher Piret likes this practice because it combines class-work preparation, individual work, and collaboration. “The teacher becomes more of a guide during the lesson and students do the tasks at their own pace. They get instant feedback and decide which items need more practice, what types of activities they prefer to do.”
In the end, students can use learnt expressions and short sentences to express their needs and describe their everyday surroundings (family, friends, home, school).
Although it might seem initially challenging to use multiple tools at a time, the tools presented here are quite easy to use. Teachers can adapt the tools and activities to their own case without having to use Google Classroom. They can also use another team creation platform or a learning management system.
Providing some scaffolding to students who are struggling is very important and it can be done while students are working independently in class. This might be more difficult in an an online or hybrid setting, but teachers can still monitor how students are answering on their dashboard also remotely.