Top 5 ESL Vocabulary Activities for Kids & Adults | TEFL Vocab Games, Activities, and Teaching Tips

If you’re looking for some of the best ESL Vocabulary activities of TEFL vocabulary games for kids as well as adults, then you’re in the right place. Check out these fun English vocab games to teach new words in style. These activities are fun, engaging, and interactive and will help students remember new words easily. ----------------------- More ESL vocabulary games and activities: Check out: https://www.eslactivity.org/esl-vocabulary-activities-for-adults/ ----------------------- Check out this simple vocabulary activity for kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2XluvP9HlY ------------------------- Want to find out more about teaching vocabulary to English learners? 39 ESL Vocabulary Activities: https://amzn.to/3eAY79u Even more Ideas for the TEFL Classroom: https://eslspeaking.org/ https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie #teachingenglishwithjackie #esl #eslactivities #teachingenglishabroad ----------------------------- More ESL vocab activities from @Etacude English Teachers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuZnwjdquJw ----------------------------- Transcript: Hey everybody, this is Jackie Bolen from eslspeaking.org. Today i'm going to talk about my top five ESL vocabulary activities. My number one vocab activity is concentration. This is basically a matching memory game. Make up matching sets of cards. There are various options. You can put the word and a picture word definition, yeah, whatever you want depending on the level. And then make up sets for every group of four students and they can put the cards face down, mixed up, face down on a table and then the first student can choose two cards. If they match, they keep them and get a point and go again. If they don't match, they put them down in the same spot. The game can continue until all the cards are gone. The next one is word association (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTDWlRTYfHA&t=3s). This vocabulary activity is perfect if you are teaching about hobbies or sports, weather, etc. These are topics that are super common in ESL textbooks and that you think your students have probably studied before. Write down weather on the board or sports or whatever it is and then kind of make a mind map. Just get students to shout out words and then you can kind of group them by categories. The next one is dictogloss (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F-IkZZqvFM). This is a classic ESL listening activity that's also great for vocabulary. Find or write a passage with lots of the target vocabulary in it. Then put students into pairs and they should each have a pen and paper. Read it out at a faster than normal pace for the level of the student and then they can each take notes. They want to recreate what they've heard. That's the ultimate goal so after you read it out, students can compare what they have with their partner and then read it out again and students can take notes again and then compare. And finally, in the end, they should have something that looks quite similar to the original passage. The next one is flyswatter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=488eabHRk0E). This is a really fun game for kids. You need to have two flyswatters and divide the team into two teams and then write down a bunch of vocab words on the board, on the whiteboard. And then one student from each team comes up to the board and each of them has a fly swatter. Then I will give hints about that word. For example, if it's soccer, I'll say this is a sport played with a ball. There are 11 people on each team and then they should get it so they would attempt to beat the other person by hitting soccer first with their flyswatter. And then I erase that word and then I'll add a new word into that spot and then someone else from the team can come up and play. The final esl vocabulary activity is odd one out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80vtLosY1JA&). So this is a nice one for working on vocabulary but also reasoning and yeah, some critical thinking skills. Write down four words. For example, apple, orange, banana, carrot. Students have to find the odd one out and tell you why. So in this case it would be carrot because it's a vegetable. I will allow any answer as long as students are able to support it. There are some more subtle ones. That's it for my ESL vocab activities. Timestamp: 0:00 Intro 0:25 Concentration 1:10 Word association 1:52 Dictogloss 2:39 Flyswatter 3:33 Odd one out 4:41 Conclusion Tags: tefl vocabulary games, tefl vocabulary game, tefl vocab game, tefl vocab games, tefl vocabulary activity, tefl vocabulary activities, tefl vocab activity, tefl vocab acivities, esl vocab, esl vocabulary, esl vocabulary activity, esl vocabulary activities, esl vocab game, esl vocab games, esl vocabulary game, esl vocabulary games, ell vocab, ell vocabulary, ell vocabulary games