English Lessons at US High School - Part 1 - Vocabulary

        A sample of vocabulary worksheet at US High School 

                You have the same timetable every day so English was always my last lesson. We did the same thing every Monday and Friday. We got a list of new vocabulary and worksheets to it every Monday. We had to fill in the worksheets and learn the vocabulary by Friday and on Friday there was a test. Nowadays you can also meet such vocabulary tests in Czech schools but 8 years ago I wasn’t used to that kind of testing. There were definition matching, true or false statements, giving definitions, fill in the gaps and many more. I must admit that I failed the first test but after that I was the best student from our class. The American teenagers were simply lazy to learn new vocab.

                Some of the vocabulary is used quite often but some words are used very rarely in everyday conversation. If you know them, though, it means that you are well educated. My host family once told me that uneducated people don’t understand words which are longer than 3 syllables. It sounds funny but it’s true.

                Another funny situation with English vocabulary was when I met a friend who studied the same vocabulary 2 years ago. She looked at my list. Then she smiled happily and said: ‘Yes, I still remember them.’ It seems to me that in English speaking countries people learn their mother tongue in the same way as foreign languages. In Czech schools we only learn a few words that came from Latin or Greek but the list is very short if we compare it with American lists.

                Of course, vocabulary wasn’t the only thing we did during the English lessons. We also wrote essays, gave speeches, worked with poems and read books. I’m going to talk about it in another article.