ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#26 | July 22, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036
Sally Trowbridge of TeachingEnglish has published an article titled “Lexical notebooks or vocabulary cards?”.
Sally Trowbridge says, “Few would doubt that students should leave a lesson with some kind of transcript of it: be it a notebook or, if technology allows, pages from an Interactive WhiteBoard (IWB) emailed to your students – in order to be able to go over the material covered in class.
As far as vocabulary learning is concerned, it is important to record new language in a way that is memorable and manageable. To this effect, I have always encouraged my students to keep a lexical notebook to record new lexis which comes up in class.
Lexical notebooks
A lexical notebook is different from a vocabulary notebook where you merely write new words in alphabetical order alongside their L1 translations. The idea behind a lexical notebook is to organize new lexis in a way that would closely resemble the way it occurs in the real language. For example, if the expression doesn’t ring a bell comes up in class I encourage my students to record it exactly the way they encountered it, ideally in a full sentence”.