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Chapter 6 - Vocabulary and Word Choice with Technology

Moving Generation Alpha English learners from words they recognise to words they can use

The thesaurus trap, and how to fix it for good

A student wants to describe a teacher they admire, writes "good," looks up synonyms, and lands on "exquisite" - a word they've never used before, that does not collocate with "teacher." The fix is not avoiding thesauruses but pairing every lookup with a collocation check: Ozdic (free) or SKELL show what a word actually partners with, not just what it technically means.

Tool	Best use	Avoid using it for
Thesaurus alone	Generating candidate words	Final word choice without a collocation check
Ozdic / SKELL	Checking real collocations	Initial brainstorming (slower than a thesaurus)
AI chat	Explaining nuance between near-synonyms	Generating the student's actual sentence content

Productive versus receptive: a five-minute check

Give students a list of ten words they likely recognise from reading. Ask them to use five in original sentences, unaided. The words they cannot productively use, despite recognising them, are your actual vocabulary teaching targets - not the words they've never seen at all.

Additional activities for Chapter 6

Individual15 minDigital

Activity 6.A - Collocation Detective. Students take five "very + adjective" phrases from their own recent writing and use Ozdic to find one stronger single-word replacement with a correct collocation, recording the example sentence Ozdic provides.

Pair20 min

Activity 6.B - Receptive-to-Productive Challenge. Using the five-minute check above, pairs trade word lists and try to use their partner's "recognised but unused" words in a short paragraph.

Further resources

Appendix E - Vocabulary Instruction Resources ↗
SKELL (skell.sketchengine.eu), Ozdic (ozdic.com), Ludwig.guru