Walking words is a collaborative group activity similar to the jigsaw activity, which helps students to know the meaning of new content vocabulary. Each group predicts and writes the meanings of two or three new topic-specific words. Half the members of each group then ‘walk the words’ to a new group in order to share their words and meanings. They also listen to the other members of the new group. Two new students from each group then ‘walk the words’ on to the next group… and so on for four or five changes. This strategy helps ELLs to use their prior knowledge and context to predict the meaning of a new word. Students are actively involved and using their metacognitive processes which assists in word retention.
Watch this video to see a year 7–8 science class using the walking words activity
Published on: 19 Jan 2018
