On Repeat: Level 1: Word-to-Context

“On Repeat” is an umbrella term for a series of games, activities, and exercises that bridge the language-to-context gap, which I use in PREXcoaching®. I have divided them into three levels/categories, starting with the easiest one.

When I was teaching, especially vocab, I always insisted that my students not only learn different synonyms but also different contexts for new words.

Translations are good to know, but they won’t help you much in real-life situations if you’re surrounded by people who don’t speak your language. There is nothing worse than knowing what you want to say but not being able to express yourself.

Definitions are particularly useful if you want to elaborate on things or clarify them, though they rarely activate usage on their own in practice.

Synonyms, on the other hand, are the go-to tool for unlocking the full meaning of a new word, as they open the door to something called context(ul meaning).

Scientifically speaking, we need to encounter a specific word on about 15 – 20 different occasions to be able to actively recall it (Webb, 2016; Elgort, 2018), and some studies suggest that this number might be even higher. In addition, contextual learning improves vocabulary retention by up to 30% (Hulstijn, 2018).

If you’re into the science of vocab acquisition in second languages, check out these and more interesting facts and studies in this great article linked here.

This is why I always insisted that my students know how to use a specific word in many different contexts, either individually or in pairs/groups.

Below is one of the simplest forms of Level 1 On Repeat games.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the verb attenuate means to make something slender or weaker, or to make something longer and thinner. In terms of synonyms, this can mean to make thin or slender, reduce, diminish, lessen, decrease, dilute, impair, enfeeble, and so on.

Likewise, Hrvatski jezični portal defines the word olakotan in Croatian as koji ublažava odgovornost, koji položaj čini lakšim; olakšavajući.

So the question is – can you use attenuate and/or olakotan in sentences in ten different contexts? 😏