How to Using vocabulary in context in Teaching secondary science to English as a second language learners

It's really important when we're thinking about vocabulary it's so important to think about these words in context it's really difficult to try and learn lists of vocabulary and actually if we don't use these words in context then it's going to be really difficult to remember them and actually to use them when we talk and write about science so any way of getting learners to put these words into context is going to be really helpful so when they're reading words rather than having lists read them in context read short text so that they can do a bit of decoding they can look at the words in context, and it's more meaningful another tip for this is to encourage your learners to write a personal science dictionary so when they learn or come across a new word in science encourage them to write this in their dictionary it's really useful to have a picture, so this could be a hand-drawn picture from the students the word also pronunciation is really challenging in English so if students write phonetically how that word sounds to them when they look back they will help them to pronounce the words accurately and also what it's really helpful is if the learner can write that word in a sentence and that actually is really useful for the students, and it helps them to remember and how that word is used in English but actually for you as the teacher you can check you can see does this learner actually understand this word are they using it correctly in this science context the really useful thing is to encourage your learners to use graphic organizers so in language it's really helpful to categorize I've talked a lot about using words in context and this is another way that your learners can help themselves to learn vocabulary, so an example of this could be acidity so if they can categorize different substances that have a high acidity, and then they can go into the different categories and this really is helpful and depending on what stage learners are at this could be simply visual, so they could draw pictures or sticking images, or they could use the written word also another idea to support students with vocabulary learning is actually to play games, so this could be some typical games like bingo jeopardy things like this, but also I think using flashcards is hugely helpful for our science learners and a tip to use the flashcards is to have flashcards with the written words on and the images separately now you might think as a teacher this is going to take quite some time to prepare these resources but actually a much more effective way is to get your learner's to create these again you might be thinking about the time pressures in classroom time that might be taken away precious time that you need to focus on the topics, but there's a good idea to actually get your students to do it could be a flipped classroom idea where you give them a list of words that they're going to be using for the next lesson and ask each student to create maybe two or three flashcards all the class bring those in, and then they can use those as reinforcement, so they have the visual and the written word, and it's all reinforcement another really positive thing about using flashcards is in a way students can't make a mistake so if they match the wrong word with a picture they can ease we change them around until they're satisfied that they've got those vocabulary words right