How to revise vocabulary when you do not speak the language

The problem with the way most children revise

Ask a child how they revised and they will usually say one of three things: they read through the list, they copied it out, or they highlighted it. All three feel like work. None of them does much.

The reason is that all three can be done while thinking about something else entirely. A child can copy out forty words and think about football for the whole ten minutes. Nothing has been retrieved from memory, so nothing has been strengthened.

Learning happens at the moment of effort: when your child tries to produce a word from memory, gets it slightly wrong, and then finds out. That moment of struggling and checking is worth roughly ten times more than the same time spent reading.

The ten-minute routine

This works for a Year 7 word list and for GCSE. It works in French, Spanish, German, anything.

1. English to foreign, out loud. You read the English. Your child says the French or Spanish. You check against the sheet. This is the hard direction and the one tests usually need.
2. Mark the misses. Put a dot next to every word they could not produce. Do not correct at length, just tell them the answer and move on.
3. Second pass on the dots only. Go back through the dotted words. Some will now come. A few will not.
4. Write the stubborn ones. The three or four that keep failing get written out from memory, then checked letter by letter. Spelling matters in written exams, and accents count.
5. Come back tomorrow. Start the next session with yesterday's dots before touching anything new.

This is the most useful thing on this page and the hardest to persuade a teenager of.

Testing in the direction that counts

There are two directions, and they are not equally difficult.

Foreign to English is recognition. Your child sees la piscina and says "swimming pool". This is the easier direction and it is what reading and listening papers need.

English to foreign is production. You say "swimming pool" and your child has to build la piscina from nothing, with the right spelling and the right little word in front of it. This is what writing and speaking need, and it is where the marks are lost.

Children naturally revise in the easy direction because it feels better. Your job is to insist on the hard one. If they can do English to foreign, they can already do the other way round.

Words are not the whole job

A child who knows forty isolated words often still cannot write a sentence. Modern languages teaching increasingly builds from chunks rather than single words, which is why your child may have a sentence builder or a knowledge organiser rather than a plain list.

If they do, use it the same way, but test whole phrases. Ask for "I play football on Saturdays" rather than just "football". The phrase is what comes out in an exam, and phrases are easier to remember than the words inside them.

Spacing: why last night does not work

Anything learned in one sitting starts leaking almost immediately. The fix is not more time, it is more occasions. The same total time, split across four days, produces far more durable memory than one block.

Then, and this is the part almost everyone skips, come back to the list a fortnight later for three minutes. That single revisit is what moves words from "learned for the test" to "actually known".

Saying it out loud

Vocabulary that has only ever been read silently tends to collapse in a speaking exam. Words need to have been in the mouth, not just the eyes.

You do not need to model the pronunciation. Your child's teacher does that, and most schools use audio that your child can access. What you can do is insist that the answer is spoken rather than mumbled or written. If you want to check a pronunciation, the audio on a dictionary site such as WordReference is more reliable than a machine voice reading a translation.

Do not worry about your own accent putting them off. Children are not fragile about this, and an interested parent who says bonjour badly is worth more than a silent one.

Apps: which ones actually help

The test for any app is simple. Does it make your child retrieve, and is it using the exact list the school has set?

• Quizlet, Blooket, Memrise, Language Nut, Sentence Builders. Useful when the teacher has set the list. Push your child towards the modes that require typing or speaking rather than multiple choice, because multiple choice is recognition again.
• Duolingo. Enjoyable, habit-forming, and teaching its own syllabus. Good for keeping a child warm and interested. It will not prepare them for Friday's test.
• Translation tools. Fine for checking a single word. A red flag if homework is being produced with them, because teachers can see it instantly and your child learns nothing.

What to say when they say they have done it

"I've revised" usually means "I've looked at it". You do not need an argument. You need one question:

Great. Test me on five of them, then I'll test you on five.

Being tested by your child is not a trick, it is genuinely useful. Explaining and quizzing someone else forces the same recall. It also turns a chore into something closer to a game, and it means you are learning a bit too, which children find quietly satisfying.