ESL Vocabulary Exercises

Easy ESL vocabulary exercises that will work in any classroom - these activities will help build foundational reading skills and extend critical thinking.

Daily immersion in social language allows students to quickly make associations between routine words and meanings. Learning academic language, however, with its unfamiliar words and often novel contexts, is more of a challenge.

English language learners (ELL) may take six months to 2 years to learn social language, but catching up with academic language often requires 4-9 years.

ESL Teaching Strategies

ESL vocabulary exercises have to focus on building background knowledge to support learning. Teachers must regularly pre-teach key academic content vocabulary by manipulating words within novel or meaningful contexts.

These strategies may not be all that different from what you already use in the classroom. The difference is that it is critical to directly use these techniques every day in ESL vocabulary exercises.

• Beyond merely introducing and copying textbook definitions, teachers encourage students to create original "in-your-own-words" definitions and sample sentences.


• Students identify examples and non-examples of vocabulary using words and/or sketches.


• Several key vocabulary words are quickly connected within pair of sentences or a short, original scenario or story slice. The same idea could be used to create a card game.


• By translating new vocabulary into their native language, English language learners instantly are building background knowledge on previous learning. Sometimes there is an obvious word similarity between the languages (dictionary – diccionario).


• Word roots and affixes are analyzed and explored for meaning patterns (rhinoceros: rhino = nose, keras = horn; tricerotops: tri = three, keratos = horned, ops = face). This should be part of any lesson you use when teaching vocabulary.


• Pairs of students physically manipulate, classify, and reclassify word cards into groups. As each grouping is evaluated and questioned for meaning, the language of compare and contrast becomes the norm as definitions are clarified.


• Large graphic organizers and word sorts (such as organized word walls, charts, and tables) are displayed to show relationships.

By building background knowledge within the academic vocabulary, you will be making a concrete way for students to scaffold their learning while deepening their understanding of the English language.

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