When we started working on color vocabulary, Ama’s face went dark. I didn’t know her well because she had just started in my class that day, but you’d have to be blind not to notice she was seething. She was a cross between furious and frustrated, and I’m sure that if she’d had the vocabulary to tell me exactly what she thought of what we were doing, my eyebrows and eyelashes would’ve been singed from that red-hot anger.
Ama had just placed into our IEP’s A1 class, the absolute lowest level we offered. I knew that she’d spent months at another language school before coming to our program. She’d learned some English there, sure, but she had massive knowledge gaps. Her listening comprehension was a solid A1+. She could write a basic paragraph, but only on three topics…they were clearly memorized, not constructed. Verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, vocabulary, pronunciation, reading comprehension…it was all a hit or miss. But in her mind? She was weeks away from crushing the TOEFL and getting into her dream university program.
And I was the only thing standing in her way.
The Problem with Big Dreams and Low Proficiency
Look, I get it. Ama had goals. Real ones. She didn’t come to the U.S. to learn about someone’s favorite color or discuss the weather. She came to get into a graduate program, and every day spent on “basic” English like the months of the year or days of the week or how to tell time felt like a waste to her.
But here’s the thing. You can’t skip A1 and magically land at C1 just because you really, really want to. That’s not how language acquisition works. And when students like Ama mentally check out lessons because they don’t see the connection to their goals, your whole class can spiral.
I’d had enough classes derailed by students who thought they knew better than me what they needed. The eye-rolling, the heavy sighs, the phone-checking while I’m mid-sentence. The barely concealed frustration and the inevitable demand to speak to the director. I knew I was about to star in a giant complaint.
So I knew I had about five seconds before Ama decided this lesson was beneath her and either tuned out completely (not likely with how she was radiating anger) or walked out to hunt down the director. Thankfully, I was ready.
I turned that zero level vocabulary into test prep.
“Color names are basic, but we will do more,” I announced. “Ama, one of our activities today is Step One in getting faster at the reading section questions on the TOEFL. With practice, you’ll be able to answer this type of question in under a minute.”
Her head snapped up. Her notebook opened. Her pen appeared like magic…and she did NOT look like she was going to throw it at me.
The rest of the class looked confused. TOEFL? Had I gotten them mixed up with another class?
And yeah, because I WAS teaching two different levels at the same time, I sometimes mixed things up, but this? This was a strategy.
Use Color Vocabulary to Teach How to Read a Graph
Reading graphs shows up constantly on proficiency exams. Charts, tables, visual data. You need to interpret them quickly and accurately. But here’s what nobody talks about: depending on where your students are from, they might have NEVER done this in their own language. Not in school. Not anywhere. (And yes, Ama was from one of those countries.)
By the time students were in a high enough level class where that type of question would come up, they were usually still unable to answer even the simplest of questions if graphs were involved. They could handle complex grammar, but ask them to extract information from a simple graph and they’d freeze.
So, I decided to introduce them early. Only, I didn’t tell them how to interpret them. I showed them how to make them.
And by the way, with a little creativity, you can turn any vocabulary theme into a graph activity…not just colors.
The Color Vocabulary Lesson That Changed Everything for Ama
After we went over the color names (red, blue, yellow, you know the drill), I sent my students out of the classroom. Not as punishment. As investigators.
“Go to the class next door. Ask at least five people: What is your favorite color? Write down their answers. Come back in ten minutes.”
They scattered like I’d given them a treasure map. (Yes, I had made arrangements for my students to invade the class next door earlier that morning.)
When they came back, I put a blank bar graph on the board. Horizontal axis: colors. Vertical axis: number of people. I used some fake color data to walk them through how to fill in the bar graph. Then I told them to use the information they had just gotten from the class next door to create and fill in their own bar graph.
They got it immediately. Three people said blue? The blue bar goes up to three. Five people said red? Red bar goes to five.
When they finished, I didn’t need to explain how to interpret a graph. They already knew. They’d just built one themselves using information they’d collected.
Of course, most graphs aren’t just about color, so we made new ones using just a pencil or pen. Then, they wrote the color names along the horizontal axis, including the ones that NO ONE had said was their favorite color.
Later that day (this was an all-day class), I showed them a different graph with different information and asked questions about it. They answered them easily with no confusion or panic.
Then I showed Ama a couple of pages from a practice TOEFL and a practice IELTS that had graphs. Now, she was a bit taken aback to realize that the vocabulary on those pages was beyond her, but she realized that she was taking a step towards know how to answer those types of questions.
I continued using graphs wherever I could in our lessons. I’d already been incorporating graphs into my lessons, but yeah, I did more of them because of Ama.
By the end of the week, she was friendly with me. Now, Ama rarely smiled. It was her trademark. But I saw her mouth twitch when she figured out how to interpret a pie chart all on her own AND answer the questions.
Because I’d shown her that even basic content could teach advanced strategies, she quit fighting to get out of the level and go directly to the highest one we had.
Two Things That Make This a Go-To Move for Any Teacher
Match high-level strategies with low-level content. You don’t need complex vocabulary to teach graph interpretation. You don’t need advanced grammar to teach scanning techniques. You need the strategy itself, taught explicitly, matched with content your students can handle right now.
Tell them exactly how it connects to their goals. Don’t make students guess. Don’t assume they’ll figure it out. Tell them straight up: “This activity teaches you how to answer Question Type X on the TOEFL.” Students obsessed with passing proficiency exams resist lessons where they don’t see the connection. Make the connection visible, and they’ll buy in.
Why This Matters for You
You’ve got students like Ama in your classes right now. Maybe they don’t make their feelings as clear as she did, but they’re there. They’ve got sky-high goals and basement-level skills. They’re the ones who think your carefully planned lessons are beneath them. The ones who make you want to scream, “If you already knew everything, you wouldn’t BE here.” (But you don’t scream that. Because you’re a professional.)
But what if instead of fighting them, you gave them what they need…proof that you’re taking them where they want to go, even if the path looks different than they expected?
Teach the strategies. Make them explicit. Show students how the “basic” lesson connects to their “advanced” goal. Let them practice high-level skills with low-level content.
Then watch them stop fighting you and start trusting you.
The Bottom Line
Ama didn’t pass the TOEFL in a few weeks. Of course she didn’t. But she stopped treating every lesson like an obstacle and started treating them like steps. She learned that color vocabulary wasn’t zero level English when it taught her how to handle visual data on a timed exam.
Your difficult students aren’t trying to make your life miserable (well, mostly). They just can’t see how what you’re teaching gets them where they’re going. So, show them the bridge and make it explicit. Give them their strategies early, even if the content feels basic.
They’ll stop slamming their notebooks shut and start opening them.
That’s it from me. See you in the next post!
Teaching beginners?
You want the Essential Vocabulary for Adult ESL Newcomers BUNDLE available in my TpT store.
