21.5.10

Learn English vocabulary with movement

So many students waste time trying to memorize English vocabulary.  They study long lists of vocabulary.  They repeat the lists many times, trying to memorize the English words and their translated meanings.
Research shows that 80% of vocabulary learned in this way is forgotten in less than a year.  That’s a lot of wasted time and effort.
There’s another problem with this vocabulary learning method– it’s boring and therefore it kills long term motivation.  Students must be very careful– killing your motivation is the worst thing you can do.  Learning English is a marathon, it’s a long run.   It requires high levels of motivation that are sustained for many years.
Using boring vocabulary learning methods, therefore, is doubly bad:  it is inefficient and it weakens motivation.
There is a better way.  It is possible to learn new vocabulary in a way that is far more powerful AND is a lot of fun.  When you learn in this way, you will remember 80% one year later!  That’s powerful.
The key to deep, powerful, long term vocabulary learning is movement.  When we combine strong physical movements with understandable new vocabulary, we create deep connections in our brains and bodies.  These connections are long term.  They last!
In my seminar, I taught a number of new words using strong actions.  The students shouted the new words with me, while simultaneously using the strong actions I showed them.  By the end of the lesson, they knew those words well.
But that’s not all.  Since Effortless English is a deep learning system, I repeated those new words again– this time in a Mini-Story.  Each time I used one of the new words in the story, I used the same physical movement we had been practicing.   Through the Mini-Story, the students got even more repetition of the vocabulary, with emotion and strong movements.
Finally, I gave the students homework:  download the audio of the same Mini-Story lesson, and listen to that audio every day for one week.
If the students do this, they will learn these new vocabulary words very deeply, and will remember them forever.   That is the power of the Effortless English system, and that is the power of using physical movement while learning!
- AJ Hoge, Effortless English Club

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