Content-based intruction: vocabulary

When teaching new vocabulary, it is difficult to find the easiest way for your students to remember words. It is common sense now that memorizing lists of words is not effective in the long run as we are triggering only the short term memory. Weeks later, your students will forget 90% of memorized words. What is even worse, is that even if they actually remember most of them, they will not know how to use them in actual sentences.

Content-based instruction is a common practice nowadays where the student gets to "discover" the meaning of a word within a text. First, he/she remembers better because the meaning is revealed by actual search, exploration that the student does. Second, he/she will know how the word is applied in actual speech by seeing it within a sentence and linking it to other parts of the sentence that make sense together. Lastly, by introducing new vocabulary within a text, your students will learn to relate certain words to a story or a feeling they had while reading the story which will eventually make them remember it for a long time, if not forever.