By the time this article is published, many of you will be nearing time for final exams. The focus will begin to shift from new content and learning to how to utilize the skills that your students have been practicing all year. Whether you give a comprehensive final that summarizes the content of the year, or assign a task requiring your students use what has been learned to evaluate and analyze new content, teaching a review strategy will help your students be successful.
And although they may feel a bit old-fashioned, flashcards continue to be a valuable resource for students of all levels and abilities when it comes time for review. However, instead of the simple English/target language flip cards that many of us studied with, we have found some new and invigorating ways to really make flashcards a really valuable tool for modern learners. Today, we will look at how to best make flashcards, including a few digital options, and then how to best put them in practice.
Option 1: Cognate Flashcards
Let me begin this section by saying that I do not recommend old-school flashcards with the target language on one side and English on the other. While they do have their place, in many ways they actually slow down the learning process as they put students in a translation mindset instead of in a language production mindset.
Instead, look through your curriculum for 25-50 high-frequency cognates. Especially for proficiency-based teachers, where the final has students analyze a piece of text or listening selection that they have not seen before, giving students a core vocabulary can help them be successful in these challenging situations. For these types of flashcards, it is best for one side to have a picture of the vocabulary word, with the other side having the word in the target language.
Especially for listening practice, quizlet.com is the most valuable tool for making this type of card. You have access to a wide variety of pictures from the Internet, and when set up to be in the target language, Quizlet will also accurately pronounce the words for the students, giving them valuable practice. Even though hearing the words in isolation, students are becoming familiar enough with them so they may recognize them through their sound in context, and these few words can be the key to solid listening comprehension.
Option 2: Definition-Based Flashcards
For more advanced learners, or even for lower-level classes where you want to focus on vocabulary development, target language definition flashcards are a valuable tool for increasing student proficiency. For these flashcards, the front of the card is a vocabulary word, again either high-frequency or based around the content of your curriculum, and the flipside is either a definition, as basic or as advanced as your students can handle, or is a synonym to the word. Both styles of flashcards keep students in the target language, and are a great way to build student confidence in reading comprehension.
While these flashcards can also be done digitally, there actually may be more benefit to having students do these more traditionally with real paper cards. If you are doing synonym cards, have students come up with their own synonyms. A great challenge would be for them to write down as many as they know or can think of; and if students are doing definitions, provide the definition but have students annotate the cards by marking [underlining or highlighting high frequency words, keywords, etc.
If you are teaching enough students in person, or have the capabilities to do so virtually, pair students and ask one to use the student’s phone to record a video of the other responding to the cards as their partner presents them one by one. This can be turned into a class competition to create a “perfect score” video with a set of cards. These videos can be uploaded to the class’ Google Classroom or shared drive so you can spot-check to find out which students are making progress in learning a vocabulary set and which need more help.
Using The Flashcards: What Our Brains Want Us to Do
Many teachers will simply end with creating the flashcards. However, persuading students to memorize them on their own time, and showing students the best way to utilize flashcards is a valuable classroom activity for instructors that can greatly enhance student language retention and make the flashcards more challenging and engaging.
Instead of simply memorizing a word and moving on, ask students to put flashcards into 4 piles: Daily, Every 3 Days, Weekly, and Incorrect.
All cards start in the daily pile. If a student gets a flashcard wrong, it then goes into the incorrect pile. If a student gets a flashcard right, 3 days in a row, it then goes into the every 3 day pile. This pile, as the name implies, only needs to be reviewed every 3 days. If the student still gets it right twice in a row in the every 3 day pile, it can then be moved to the weekly pile, where it stays until the student is incorrect. For a card that students find their response is “incorrect,” I personally recommend it stay in the incorrect pile to be reviewed daily, until the student can correctly answer the card 3 times, where it then is moved back into the daily pile. While this may seem complicated, especially at first, this approach guarantees that students are practicing what they most need while also making sure that what they have already mastered is not being forgotten.
For another perspective on how to best use flashcards, although from a non-language viewpoint, see this video for even more inspiration.