Recreational Problem-Solving Activities for Teaching Vocabulary in Elementary and Intermediate Spanish

ARTICLE REVIEW
Article title : Recreational Problem-Solving Activities for Teaching Vocabulary in Elementary and Intermediate Spanish
Writer : Frank Nuessel
Journal/Newspaper : JSTOR
Date published : March 1994 Number of words: 2.942
List No. : 328
This article tells about how to teach vocabulary in Elementary and intermediate Spanish that written by Frank Nuessel. Furthermore, this article discusses practical strategies designed to elicit vocabulary without translation and presents examples of a cross-skills approach that requires students to utilize different linguistic abilities to generate appropriate lexical responses. Besides, teaching vocabulary has received an increasing attention from scholars in second language teaching, especially in English as a Second Language.
To achieve the goal for providing an effective teaching vocabulary by using recreational problem-solving activities which consist of two basic categories, namely puzzles and games. Puzzles require the individual learner to formulate a solution, while games involve interaction among learners. In other word, they divided into several exercises or activities, such as: vocabulary finder, crossword puzzles, tic-tac-toe, scrambled words, and word creation. Those exercises or activities engage students in getting meaningful relationship among lexical items. On the other hand, they can also serve to reinforce factual data, such as: political, physical geography, and history. For example, in puzzles can include the names of famous people. So the students will develop their knowledge to know what the people are.
The writer put himself in this article as only a researcher. He wanted to know how the recreational activities, such as: vocabulary finder, crossword puzzles, tic-tac-toe, scrambled items, and word creation are effective or not to teach Spanish vocabulary.
The writer said that vocabulary finder, crossword puzzles, tic-tac-toe, scrambled items, and word creation can be incorporated into standard assessment instruments, such as quizzes and tests. Because of that I support him. I think by using those activities can help the teachers and students to improve their vocabulary mastery. Also, those activities represent interesting and challenging opportunities for students to acquire Spanish vocabulary.
When I taught my students in a course, I used crossword puzzles activity. By using it, students must supply an appropriate and accurate answer about antonym and synonym. It can be related to my experience that uses recreational problem-solving activities in teaching vocabulary.