Dictionary group making activity

To make groups of three.

Need: three small pieces of paper for each student.

1. Either invididually, in pairs or in threes, students use dictionaries (lower level) or their imagination (higher level) to write an English dictionary definition in the format:

headword (part of speech)

definition (not including headword)

example (using ~ in place of headword word)

for example:

Vocabulary (noun)

The group of words that a person knows, or that a book or other text contains.

For example: Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 20,000 words.

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Each of the three parts should be written on a different piece of paper.

2. Collect the pieces of paper when all three are ready.

3. When n/3 definitions are ready (n = number of students), shuffle and distribute them at random.

4. Students must find the other two parts of the dictionary entry.

Useful phrases:

"Do you have a headword, a definition or an example?"

"What does ~ mean?"

"Do you have an example using ~?" 

"Taro-kun has that definition"

"Maybe Megumi-chan has an example of that word."

"What is [definition]"

"What is the missing word in this example? [...] blank [...]"