^{Free ESL Vocabulary List for Intermediate English Learners!}

by Larnell Perrin-Smith

May 12, 2023

Teaching ESL students at the B1 level poses a specific set of challenges and rewards for teachers. I myself find this part of the ESL student’s language journey to be one of my favorite demographics to teach as students are beginning to acquire enough vocabulary and understanding of grammar to explore sustained conversation in a new language! 

According to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) at the B1 level your students are able to “understand the main points of clear standard speech on matters that are familiar to them, can deal with most situations likely to arise during travel, and can describe experiences, events, dreams, hopes and ambitions with brief explanations to support their reasoning.” 

During this stage of language acquisition, it is very important that you, as the teacher, support your students in acquiring vocabulary that will give your students the words to describe the world around them!  

Teaching vocabulary may seem simple on the surface, but I’ve found that teachers sometimes find it difficult to effectively help their students to learn and retain new vocabulary. 

For myself, I found it helpful to follow a simple formula I like to call CPR or Contextualize, Practice, and Reinforce. While the name might be a little corny, the results are anything but! 

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Contextualize 

Human beings are really quite good at learning things that they can immediately relate to, and we struggle to retain information that seemingly has no relation to our day to day. Just think about how much easier it is to learn your coworkers names vs. the names of the past 20 Kings and Queens of England 🤔

The key is to select vocabulary that your students encounter at home, work or school, creating activities based on daily life where your students can begin to use their new vocabulary within the safety of the classroom. 

Practice

I used to be 100% guilty of underestimating the amount of practice my students needed before their new vocabulary was committed to memory. I’ve read somewhere that the average person needs to see a new word at least seven times before they can commit it to long term memory!

The biggest problem I had when I started out teaching was that I was afraid of boring my students by repeating the same vocabulary over and over again. However I quickly learned that by carefully planning my activities and encouraging my students to use new vocabulary whenever they spoke with me, I could help my students to practice without them realizing! 

Reinforce 

Once your students have learned new vocabulary, don’t just assume that’s that and move on to another set of words with their new vocabulary never to be seen again! I’ve found it very helpful to continually reinforce my student’s newly acquired vocabulary throughout the semester by encouraging them to use synonyms of their new words, especially when writing. 

Make it a regular practice during class time to direct your students to use a thesaurus! You’d be amazed at how powerful a tool a thesaurus can be! 

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Free Vocabulary List

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If you keep CPR (contextualize, practice and reinforce) in mind, you'll quickly see your students vocabulary retention rates increase! To help you provide your ESL students with relevant vocabulary at the B1 level, the team at Resourceful has curated a set of classroom-ready vocabulary based on the everyday experience of getting ready that you can use in your classroom! 

Looking for a fun and interesting way to incorporate vocabulary learning into your classroom? Visit our home page to download our free ESL course called Vocabulary Rap Battle!

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