Foundations Newsletter

By David Anderson and Lana Albardawil

Foundations Levels have extensive wordlists. Indeed, the list for Level 3 has over 800 items with 670 that are considered core.  To ensure students are exposed to as many items as possible, Al Ain Colleges have developed systematic learning materials.

Last semester, we adopted a distributed model of materials production, where practice and test items were written (mostly) by the students themselves.   These were weeded, pruned and harvested by teachers before being uploaded to Quizlet.  We called these Vocabulary Gardens.

This semester, we went back to the databases of items for Levels 1 and 2, and brought them in line with the new wordlists of the Foundation Intensive Programme.  A new landing page was designed for each level with predefined activities to direct student learning.

Level 2: (click here to visit the link)

Level 3: (Click here to visit the link)

By using Google documents, we can be sure the pages work on all portable devices.   Also, the landing pages and Quizlet website don’t require passwords or any special apps.   Students can study on any device whenever or wherever they have an internet connection, even if it is for just a few minutes.

For each wordlist, the materials include:

• the wordlist with Arabic translations (with the option to export as pdf)
• English/Arabic flashcards (with the option to hear the target vocabulary and also to ‘star’ difficult items so they can be focused on)
• a test based on English/Arabic translations
• spelling (listen and type what you hear)
• randomized practice tests of sentences with gap-fills
• review quizzes so students can cumulatively review all the previous wordlists

Quizlet also offers games which the students can select. In addition, there are links on the Vocabulary Garden pages to randomized pre- and post-test options that allow teachers to assess the vocabulary level of students at the beginning of a cycle, and progress they’ve made by the end.

Feedback on the materials is welcome via the form on the Vocabulary Garden pages.

If you would like to know more about how we produced these materials, three short videos are available on Creating a form in Google Drive (6’04”), Creating and sharing a document in Google Drive (3’57”) and Moving data from Google Drive to Quizlet to create flashcards and tests (12’10”).

If you have any questions, please contact us.