To the teacher: one way to improve students’ retention of vocabulary items is to augment vocabulary lists with questions that students can answer with true/false or yes/no responses.
Here’s an example taken from a recent English as a Second Language (ESL) class held on Winter Street in downtown Boston, close to the Park Street T station.
Please answer the questions with “yes”, “no” or “I don’t know.”
Cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce go into a salad.
Apples, pears, oranges and grapes go into a fruit salad.
A cook can broil or bake a chicken.
A chef can broil a cake.
A cook can broil fish or beef.
Pears are a fruit.
Cabbage is a vegetable.
Lemon is good on fish.
Lemon is good on beef.
Lemon is good on watermelon.
In your country, many people eat pork.
In the United States, many people eat beef.
Beef is sometimes cheap, sometimes expensive.
A cook can boil chicken before broiling a chicken.
A chicken has white meat and dark meat.
A chicken can be cut into breasts, thighs, legs and wings.
Chicken skin tastes good if the skin is broiled.
The names of two big chicken companies in the United States are Tyson and Purdue.
If you eat raw chicken, you will get sick.
If you eat raw fish, you will get sick.
If you eat raw beef, you are crazy.
Tsehay and Ana, two students in our class, are nuts.
The teacher is nuts….