Hi Amna,
Not sure if this will help but I recently did a lesson on the financial crisis with intermediate students. Before a discussion I always get students to �connect to their prior knowledge�. I think this would be very helpful for learning �key content vocabulary�. The lesson went like this:
1) Put �financial Crisis� on the board in a cloud.
2) Have students call out random words that come into their brain - accept everything!!! (you can group the words as you write them if they need support - depends on their level of english)
3) Ask the students to identify one theme or category that they have noticed. (e.g. institutions, problems, consequences, people, business etc) Go through and circle everything that fits into that category in a different colour pen.
4)Now get the students to work in groups of 3-4 people. They have to create categories for all of the other words on the board. Get them to do this on a piece of paper - organising all of the words.
5) Share the categories back as a class.
6) Get each group to identify 3 new words for each category.
7) Put all of the organised word lists on the wall for everyone to see and use while you are discussing this topic.
Optional next steps:
- Now students are ready to create questions they would like to answer
- Webquest on the topic
- Debate on the topic
- Express opinions on the topic
- share a piece of information about the topic
This is what I call scaffolding students to enable them to build their vocabulary and to warm up their english brain.
