Once a week my students have a homereading lesson. Though the main aim of such kind of lesson is to develop reading skills, I find it useful to provide vocabulary practice for those words and phrases that can be of interest or use in the text.

To focus the students’ attention on the vocabulary, that is, aid noticing, I give my students a list of phrases in Russian and ask them to look for those phrases in the text. After checking the task, I ask them to do some more exercises, in which this vocabulary is practiced at the recognition level. They are:

§         True or False statements;

§         Putting the sentences into the correct order of events;

§         Matching sentences to the paragraphs they belong to;

§         Matching phrases or parts of a sentence;

§         Who said it.

Then I ask the students to complete some exercises for production:

§         Fill in the gaps with appropriate words;

§         Finish the sentence;

§         Multiple choice;

§         Summarizing;

§         Paraphrasing, etc.

These are some example exercises for the text “The Big Red Apple. Part 1”, from English 4 (authors: Bogoroditskaya, Khrustaleva) textbook.

Find the phrases in the text:

1)      однажды __________________

2)      пошел на прогулку _________________

3)      карман ____________

4)      взошел на холм ________________________

5)      сбежал с холма ________________________

6)      выпало из кармана ________________________

7)      мог бегать быстро ______________________

8)      около холма ________________________

9)      искать что-нибудь ___________________

10)  оно перевернулось _____________________

Put the sentences into the correct order:

1. The fish looked at the apple and didn’t like it.
2. One day he went for walk.
3. The apple fell out of his pocket.
4. In his pocket there was a big red apple.
5. The boy went up and down the hill.
6. A frog wanted to sit on the apple, but it rolled over.
7. Once upon a time there was a boy.
8. The apple rolled into a pond.

Fill in the gaps:

Once upon a time there was a _________. One day he put on his ________ and cap and went for a ___________. There was a __________ in his coat. There was an ___________ in the pocket.

The boy went up the __________, then he ran down the _________. The apple fell out of the ___________. The apple rolled and fell into a ___________. Two ___________ looked at it, but they didn’t eat the ___________.

A frog wanted to __________ on the apple, but it __________ over and the apple fell into the water.