VocabAhead.com


What is this and why to use it?

This is by far my favourite website because it is of great importance and relevance to my context and to all students who are interested in continuing their studies in American universities. It offers an exquisite environment for learning new English vocabularies in an exciting and engaging way that utilises multimedia through sound and video to contextualise the learning process. Not to mention, students’ ability to see transcription of the entire videos.

How to use it?

After knowing all the nuts and bolts of this website, I would suggest the following  simple steps for teachers:

• They first have to subscribe for free in order to be able to create their own materials.

• Then, they can show students their way inside the Study Room. This room is students’ own virtual space in which they can listen, watch videos, read the accompanying transcripts, take quizzes, and create their own vocabulary lists. An exhaustive list of more than 1000 vocabularies listed alphabetically from A to Z is provided along with videos and flashcards.

• Next, students can enjoy watching the videos and learn at the same time.

• • Then, teachers can do group competition and individual and whole-class quizzes by showing the quizzes with the use of an overhead projector. This informal use of quizzes relieves students’ anxiety in learning and boosts their confidence and sense of achievement by checking their scores at the end of each quiz.
  
  • Finally, teachers can create their daily lists for learners online using the special feature shared links. To add students’ intrinsic motivation and raise the par, teachers can temporarily suspend their roles and ask students to create their own lists of words to defy them. A body of research has proven that this process has a great impact on the process of acquisition not to mention it involves a lot of fun!

Why to use it?

• It helps increase students attention by watching the videos and following the reading simultaneously in specific contexts. Therefore, instead of being daunted in a monotonous repetitive way of learning new words, students can process the new vocabularies in an interesting and motivating way.
• Research shows that once brains make connections between audio-visual and written objects, students go beyond short-term memorisation to achieve acquisition of language in the long-term.
• Teachers should also bear on mind to assign a certain number of vocabularies for students to learn on a daily basis. This process ensures scaffolding in that learners neither get hammered with extra workload nor procrastinate in the learning process.
• The Study Room promotes learners' autonomy in that learners can watch and download any video at home and at their own pace and it appeals to different learning styles. In addition, they might not know the meaning of a word in the accompanying text. So, they would look for it in their dictionaries.
Sometimes, it can be an exhausting job for teachers to explain the meanings of abstract concepts, and learners might struggle in vain to infer these meanings. Well, not only does this study room provide explanation of the vaguest and most abstract meanings, but it also gives short anecdotes about the origins of these words!

Student's ability to create their own lists and compete their lists against others can invoke skyrocketing motivation that is mostly intrinsic and then they can post them on the Shared Lists Space for others to check. This kind of group competition provides invaluable opportunities for learners to negotiate the meanings and thereby acquire language.

Here is how the list looks like:

 Extremely important features:

They have added recently three new features to this web site. These two are of great importance from pedagogical perspectives:

• First, this website gives students a platform to create and join an online community where they share, comment, and evaluate their peers' work. Online communities always run the risk of having inappropriate content. Therefore, the website does a daily check up on its content and prevents these from occurring. In addition, students can flag inappropriate content to be removed by the website designers, too.

• Second, they can ask questions and get answers to their lingering queries to their teachers and other members of the same community, even their classmates on the shared forum.

• My favourite feature is that students can upload their own videos of the word meanings and can watch other friends videos to get ideas, learn, and maybe compete against them. Not only student can comment on them, but also they can rate them or stop them from appearing in case they flouted the codes of propriety

 

Limitations:

1. Of course, both teachers and learners should have a decent Internet connection to view or download these videos.
2. It is difficult in some cases to pause or rewind parts of the videos.
3. They can only be used with higher levels in English and of interest.