With alternative word tests, certains words must be replaced by others (often synonyms). This provides an active vocabulary extension – whereby all students are included and the vocabulary is repeated and practiced.
Variants (appropriate for lower level and above, depending on the complexity):
- The instructor provides a sheet of paper with a table and a sentence on top, which reads, for example “it is snowing heavily today” or “my mother often drinks water from the blue glass”. There is a column for each word or sentence. In the next column of the table, the students should write similar sentences or sentence parts (or the opposite), such as: “it rained a little yesterday”, “your sister never slurps her tea from a red bottle” etc.
- The instructor provides a short text (½ page; wide linespacing) with the following instructions: “replace all underlined words (or: all nouns, verbs, adjectives) with words that have approximately the same meaning!”
- As above, but with instructions to replace all words with their opposites, example: “the tiny dog” → “the giant cat”; “the man ran through the woods” → “the woman crawled across the meadow”). An entertaining extension, which is ideal for working in pairs, is writing “opposite texts” i.e. re-writing an entire story or newspaper article in the opposite sense).
- As above, but grammatically oriented: change all nouns from the singular to plural form and make the verbs agree!”, “change all verbs from the present to the past tense”, “replace all adjectives with their comparative forms (good → better)” etc.
- Teaching stylistics: The students receive a text (prepared by the instuctor) which comprises many repetitions of the same words and other flaws (e. g. each sentence begins with “and then” and there are too many general words like “go” and “make”. The students work on the text in pairs; the improved texts are then compared.
- A much expanded form of the alternative word exercise is the classic re-narration of a story or text. In this exercise, the students re-tell a text (story, factual text, episode, short fairy tale) in their own words after listening to the original 1–3 times. This form is not very attractive as an exercise, owing to its somewhat artificial nature, but it can be very beneficial for vocabulary building. Communicative and motivating variants: each student receives a short text, i. e., a newspaper article. They read the text twice and then repeat the content in their own words. The original articles are then numbered and displayed on the right side of the classroom. The re-narrated versions are labelled with letters (a, b, …) and hung up on the left side. The students read the re-narrated texts and try to match them up with the original texts. They also take notes of anything missing or inaccurately re-narrated. The exercise concludes with a group discussion.
- See also #16.3: parallel texts/generative writing.