We just invested in new textbooks, which brings with it opportunities for a highly structured approach: teach chapters from books, assess chapters from books, support both with vocab sheets from the book, and have a revision lesson using the vocab sheet the lesson before you do the assessments.

Here are some activities I’ve been doing for that revision lesson just before the actual test. The emphasis on this has to be students using their vocab sheet in depth in ways that go beyond just looking at it.

My old go-to was a form of snakes and ladders. Students begin by using the vocab sheet to prepare 30 questions, where the questions is a vocab item or sentence from the sheet which someone else will have to translate.  Once four people have 30 questions, they can play snakes and ladders with each other on a basic board with counters and dice. They use their questions for each square they land on – if they can’t answer their team-mate’s question for that square they go back to where they came from.

Obviously the main revision activity here is creating the questions, but the game has a nice fun element as a reward for creating 30 questions. You can be specific about the target, eg 15 word level translations and 15 sentences, or 30 sentences for stronger classes. You can have them create questions in pairs and then two pairs play the end game.

One-pen-one-dice is a great end of unit activity too – as the teacher you write 20 sentences in the target language and print enough sheets for everyone, with enough space to write translations underneath each sentence. Steve Smith gives details on how to play the game.  My end of unit twist was to go back through the text book, look at the listening and reading resources you’ve used over the last few weeks, and get the 20 sentences from there.

I have been using my version of the three column vocab sheet  for a while. Learners have a column of English words, a column of target language words in a different order and a blank column. They then write the correct TL word next to the English.  To help make this more understandable, I’ve started putting the TL words in a box at the bottom. Here’s an example with my layout, revising the spec vocab for charity words in French. You can introduce vocab as well as revise it this way – although I find I do end up using quite a lot of lesson time to go over the answers, and that may not be the best use of time on what is essentially a word level task.

My new revision twist is to get the learners to make their own sheets, again based on the vocab sheet from the topic. I initially created a resource to give them blank sheets to complete  – this particularly helps with counting to make sure they have exactly 20 TL words and 20 English translations – but it is equally possible to just explain what you want and have them create it on blank paper. Once everyone has made a sheet, they can swap with a partner, or, have them make their sheets on a deadline towards the end of the lesson, and photocopy them before the next lesson, so that students have to complete several sheets to complete the task.

You can even combine this with the “red pen/black pen” revision task (NB actual colour of pens not important… could be pen/pencil or your pen/borrowed classroom purple pen).  Students complete all the items they can do from memory in one colour writing implement then switch to another colour so they have a very visual sheet in front of them showing what they know and don’t know.

As with many classroom tasks, both creating and completing these sheets is something that learners will do at very different speeds, so you need something else for fast finishers… I still have many blank 80 Word sheets in my filing cabinet, so that was my go to.