a) Teach your students to make small cards. They can prepare some small cards, and write the new words ( five words ) on one side , and their meanings, their pronunciation, their synonyms or antonyms, and a sample sentence in which the specified words have been used on the other side. Each day, students should memorize the 5 words of one card by repetition and writing the words many times on a piece of rough paper to learn the spelling and the meaning. When they have finished memorizing 5 cards ( in five days ), they can ask someone to check how well they have memorized the words. If they are satisfied with the result, they should move on to the next five cards. After each five cards, they should also review all the previously memorized cards. At the end of the academic year, they will have a rich vocabulary span.

b) Learners can make sentences with the new words. They can even put them in self-made stories, or articles. The teacher can take them home and correct.

c) There are different games like "hangman" , " rephrasing champions" , " the conversation game" , etc. which learners can use to improve their vocabulary span. These games will be explained in the appendix section of the book.

d) There are many words which are similar in appearance but different in meaning. Students can put these words together; this makes them aware of the subtle differences they have, and they learn a lot too. The following are some examples:

rice ~ race           meat ~ meet            see ~ sea             expect ~ except ~ accept  plan ~ plant ~ planet ~ plane ~ plain                   conservation ~ conversation

e) One good way is to put words which belong to one family group or lexicon together so that they are more interesting to learn. Students can create different families or groups based on the words in their text-books. For example, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday belong to the family of the "days of the week". Or glass, bowl, plate, pot, fork, knife, spoon, kettle, table-cloth, etc. comprise the family of "kitchen utensils".

f) Teach your students _ specially the interested ones _ the most common Greek and Latin affixes (suffixes, prefixes, and stems) with their meanings and some famous examples. For instance, "tele" means far, so "telephone" means sound or a call from far away. The affix "multi" means some, and "multivitamin" means a kind of drug which contains some vitamins. You can find a list of the most famous affixes at the appendix section of the book.

g) Ask your students to pay attention to different labels they see around them, the labels on clothes, furniture, food products, notices of shops and so on. They can learn many words spontaneously by just having a look at these labels. This can even take the form of a competition. Ask them to notice these labels and find spelling, diction (using a word in the right context), or grammatical mistakes of these labels, and bring the mistakes to the class. Give them credits for their discoveries!

 Always try to elicit synonyms, antonyms, meanings, etc. of words from the students. When you want to explain a word, first ask your students for help, and in case they cannot provide you with the correct answer, do this yourself. This will activate your students' memory, and they feel as if they are participating in the teaching process.

 Use different kinds of exercises for practicing new or difficult words. Use matching, fill in the blanks, puzzles, riddles, cloze passages, tables, diagrams, multiple-choice questions, cross-word puzzles, picture series, matching pictures and words, grouping, unscramble exercises, paragraph-writing using the new words, etc. to make the words stick in your students' minds.

 There are many different photo or picture dictionaries available in the market. Buy one and put some pages of it on the board. They are beautiful and raise the curiosity of the students. They may learn some words just by looking at these pictures. Each week, put some new pages on the board. This is a kind of peripheral learning.

At lower levels, students had better use a bilingual dictionary and at higher levels a monolingual one.

 We should give the students opportunities to recycle and revise vocabulary in the class. This will help them remember the words better. This can be done at the start and/or the end of a lesson. One way to do so is to write all the new words on the board, asking the students to put them into categories and to justify their choices. Another way is to ask them to write personalized sentences using the new words. And don't forget that the small-card technique is also based on the recycling principle

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