11 Plus Exams Forum

My child takes longer than I remember doing to learn a new list of vocabulary and seems to want me to test her frequently during the learning process, and moans and gets bored quickly with this type of homework - but ultimately does really well.

I have shown her lots of different techniques and was hoping she would be completely independent by now. Am I being too helpful or should I continue helping her develop vocabulary learning techniques for a while longer?

She did a little french at primary but of that, a high proportion is misspelled, misused or mispronounced so that may not have helped.

I just remember staring at word lists for a short while and that was enough for 9/10 in a test but I think we maybe were tested on smaller chunks more often and had more language lessons per week so new vocabulary was acquired more readily within lesson time.

What's your experience?

Some children find it easier than others. Both mine do. Ray ell on vocab tests, but they always learn them by writing them out a few times, then I test them, then they go over any wrong ones. Usually it only takes the initial writing out, but I do feel that doing that is much more effective than just looking at them. I won't test them until they have written them out at lest once or I feel I am getting too involved. The initial learning is their job.

Interesting.

Yes, I always insist that a reasonable effort has been made first of all - but maybe her facility for learning new vocabulary is not as swift as yours so she has more of a job to learn them, and more of a job to work out how to break down the learning task into one that works with her memory.

How fast can your dc learn new vocabulary. Let's say how many new french words could they learn spelling and meaning of and recall french to English and English to French in one sitting and how long would that take?

I remember short frequent lists at school - say 10 words at a time.

DD2 in yr 7 and doing French. She had a test on rooms of house and floor levels a couple of weeks ago. We spent about an hour on learning that. She looked at it first, then I asked her questions and she wrote the answers down. I marked the answers and went over what she got wrong, then we did it all again - several times. I try and mix it up and do them in a different order, and put them in sentences as well.
She learns like me, I remember my Dad testing me like this.Whereas DD1 never asks to be tested, she is happier just going over stuff on her own.

Mystery, is she more of a little and often learner than a notes/reading sort of learner. For the simple everyday things you could label them in French with post it notes around the house - a bit like some people do when their children are learning to read. This sort of drip feeding can be quite effective even if it doesn't do a lot for your decor!

Good luck, I know from personal experience that foreign language learning is much harder for some than others.

I always found Languages hard. Does anyone else use word /picture association? I will never forget the Spanish for apple is manzana as men have an Adams apple - accompanied by a mental picture of a man with an apple in his throat.
DH thinks I'm crazy, the biggest eye roll I've had so far was when I told DD2 (the poor speller) how to remember which and witch. (Witch is the one with T in it as she is a person and people drink tea. )

mystery wrote:Interesting.

Yes, I always insist that a reasonable effort has been made first of all - but maybe her facility for learning new vocabulary is not as swift as yours so she has more of a job to learn them, and more of a job to work out how to break down the learning task into one that works with her memory.

How fast can your dc learn new vocabulary. Let's say how many new french words could they learn spelling and meaning of and recall french to English and English to French in one sitting and how long would that take?

I remember short frequent lists at school - say 10 words at a time.

10 would probably take about 20 minutes?
And they always rememebr them better the next day.

I always learnt quotations from literature for exams much quicker by marching around the room playing loud dance music! Go figure, but it really helped. I've even read of people who learn better jumping on a trampoline - no seriously - could you try an 'out of the box' method?

Yamin151 wrote:I always learnt quotations from literature for exams much quicker by marching around the room playing loud dance music! Go figure, but it really helped. I've even read of people who learn better jumping on a trampoline - no seriously - could you try an 'out of the box' method?

I also wandered around to learn English lit quotes. DS1 wrote his physics and maths formulae on blown up balloons with a marker pen. He then batted them around the room reciting the formula. Not sure it's a technique in the text books but it worked - each to their own.

Oh gosh - yes when she was year 2 she used to learn her timetables on the trampoline or by shouting with a drum.

But you've made me feel better with 10 words in 20 minutes. The desperation is with more words than that and in several languages in one week sometimes depending on how the homework lands.

mystery wrote:Oh gosh - yes when she was year 2 she used to learn her timetables on the trampoline or by shouting with a drum.

How delightful that must have been!


I have never got involved in any of this stuff (bad mother) and told my lot there is no substitute for sitting down with the list, covering over the words in the target language and going down that list till you know them. In languages with gendered nouns (most (all?) European languages actually except English) always learn the gender with the word. Then write them out in muddled up order in English and fill in the foreign words. Over and over if necessary till you know them. I am a linguist, have learned many languages and have always always had to do this - it can take a while. A long while on occasions.

In answer to whether I used pictures in my head - in Russian I did as there aren't many easy or obvious words. Dog = собака = sue barker is my favourite one.еж = yozh = hedgehog, which I did by naming it Josh and rhyming it. I think maybe children expect to learn vocab a bit too easily - I was disappointed to see how little sticking power one of mine had trying to learn it and wanted easy 'tricks' and shortcuts. There aren't any.