Vocabulary Exercise with Word Cards

It's the end of week 3, Unit 3 of the TESL Teaching In Practice - Reading and Vocabulary course through U of Manitoba Extended Education. This activity uses a Task-based lesson plan from Citizenship and Immigration Canada and is inspired by the discussion in the "Which Words are Worth the Worry?" video. The lesson plan is presented as a cloze exercise for myself and a small group of peers. We completed the exercise using a shared Google doc, but I do not yet have permission from the group members to share it here. 

The assignment here is to develop a vocabulary lesson based on the above lesson plan.

I would have the students do this vocabulary activity before playing the Nutrition Facts snap game in the lesson plan.

I would prepare word cards (like flash cards with the vocab word on one side and the definition on the other side) using the thirteen core nutrients list, plus some additional words needed to understand and play the Snap game (nutrition, healthy/unhealthy, serving size, calories, percent (%) daily value).

Sample Word Card, both sides visible. Actual card has vocabulary on one side, definition on the other.

Activity:

• ·         Students would be in groups of 4 and each would get one word card. 
• ·         Ss have three minutes to look at their word, study the definition, look up additional information (eg an example or source), ask T for clarification or pronunciation
• ·         Ss take turns in their group to introduce and define their word to the group, discuss and answer questions, refine their explanation of the word (10 minutes)
• ·         Ss present their word to the whole class using the refinements. (do healthy/unhealthy first and then T writes these as column headings on board)
• ·         after each word is presented, the class will vote to place nutrition words in healthy or unhealthy column (include a little or a lot) (20-25 minutes)
• ·         groups exchange cards so each S gets a new word. Ss take cards home to study and present at next class (repetition)

The lesson plan is meant to help students to read food labels and understand how numbers are used to indicate whether foods are healthy or unhealthy. However, there are a lot of multi-syllable word specific to nutrition in this exercise, so I believe it is important to make sure the students understand what these words mean. If students come from countries where there wasn't a lot of food choice or where their food was produced by themselves or obtained directly from producers, they will not have much experience with food labels or nutrition terms in their origin language.