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Act I: The Tragedy of the Gap-Fill

Imagine this. You’re an upper-intermediate student. You chat online in English, binge entire Netflix series without subtitles, and follow influencers from three countries. You turn up at your advanced English course expecting something stimulating.
And what do you get?
“Fill in the gaps in these ten unrelated sentences.”

Yes. That’s your advanced vocabulary task. But wait — there’s more.

“Find the word which is misspelt in these ten unrelated sentences.”

You begin to wonder if you’ve stumbled into Year 3 spelling club. But no, this is your internationally published advanced vocabulary book. And finally:

“Replace the underlined word with a single word that has a similar meaning.”
So big becomes large. Bravo. Curtain down.

Meanwhile, in history you’ve analysed facsimiles of primary documents. In physics and chemistry you’ve run experiments, collected data, reported results. In literature you’ve explored metaphor, alliteration, cultural references. In every subject you’ve been expected to observe, question, and discover. Except in vocabulary study. Here your intelligence is politely ignored.

Act II: Enter tomboy

Tomboy in SKELL

One such book introduces tomboy. A definition is solemnly provided: “A girl who enjoys activities and behaviours usually associated with boys.” Very helpful — except every student already knew what it meant. So… why teach it?

The book had no interest in how the word is actually used. But the teacher did. And SKELL made that possible. With 40 student-friendly examples, each from a different text, students could ask:

Which determiners appear before tomboy?
What adjectives modify it?
What nouns follow it (tomboy stage, tomboy persona)?
Which verbs collocate with it?
Are tomboys usually children, teenagers, or adults?
Are they described positively or negatively?
What cultural references appear?

Now students aren’t parroting a definition they already knew. They’re making discoveries about usage. They’re noticing patterns, testing assumptions, reaching conclusions. And all of this is mediated through their existing knowledge of English.

They have to read, notice, compare, infer, decide — in other words, they are using their English to grow their English. That’s not a trivial task. That’s an opportunity to use higher-order thinking skills and socially construct knowledge with classmates, mediated by the teacher and the language itself.

Act III: Learning How to Learn

And here’s the deeper point. By working with tomboy in this way, students aren’t just learning one word. They’re learning how to learn vocabulary. They learn what features of words are worth knowing:

collocations
compounds
colligations
semantic features.

They learn why those features matter: because they make words usable, not just knowable. And they learn how to investigate: how to search, observe, interpret, and record.

This is metacognition in practice. It is procedural knowledge. It is training learners to keep learning. And it is done through English itself: students are using their English to analyse English.

Isn’t that exactly what upper-intermediate and advanced students should be doing? Not hunting misspellings in ten random sentences, but engaging in real inquiry — the kind that deepens knowledge and develops independence.

Curtain Call

SKELL provides a dataset of English at large, allowing students to observe the consensus patterns of thousands of speakers. If teachers want to focus on the language of a specific text — which has its own rewards — they can paste it into VersaText. Between them, these tools enable learners to treat language as evidence, not opinion; as data, not trivia.

And once you’ve seen students interrogate a word like tomboy with curiosity and intelligence, it’s very hard to go back to filling in the blanks of ten unrelated sentences.

Turning three texts into a task-based lesson with ChatGPT

How ChatGPT helped me turn three business texts into a task-based lesson that my student loved.

A student recently sent me three business documents: two case studies and one press release. They were all in Czech, her first language, and her request was vague: “describe on English and do some quick points to my LinkedIn.” No instructions, no priorities — just the documents.

My aim, as usual, was to make the experience task-based rather than a one-way translation service. The question was: how to use these texts to generate LinkedIn-ready material while also giving her a strong learning experience.

Step 1: What ChatGPT did

I gave the documents to ChatGPT without any translation into English. It read them directly in Czech and produced everything in English: lists of key vocabulary, verb + preposition patterns, noun + preposition structures, common collocations, and stylistic features such as the passive voice and nominalisations. This immediately gave us a map of useful building blocks to shape into a lesson.

Step 2: My ideas unfolded

As I looked at the extracted language, I saw the possibility of creating a set of LinkedIn-style bullet points that captured the key ideas from the three texts. The idea then grew into two layers of activity:

Sorting by project (which bullet belongs to which case study or press release).
Sorting by type: hard facts vs value-add phrases.

That meant the student wasn’t just reading polished text; she was working with raw material, noticing patterns, and making decisions.

Sample of the bullets (half of the full set)

Implemented over 80 digital components in a single solution.
Improved candidate experience and strengthened employer branding.
Delivered a scalable SaaS solution for (number) authorised dealers.
Presented electromobility models and their availability online.
Educated customers about sustainability and green mobility.
Built tools to showcase services and car offers consistently across the dealer network.
Contributed to (company name)’s position in the market.

Step 3: The worksheet

With ChatGPT’s help, I created a one-page worksheet in minutes. It contained:

A list of mixed bullet points from all three documents.
Instructions to sort them by project and by fact/value.
A set of frames for turning facts into stronger LinkedIn statements.

Step 4: From facts to value

The worksheet also included frames that allow facts to be reshaped into value-add statements, such as:

Contributed to + [bigger goal] by + [action]
Focused on + [area] to + [outcome]
Implemented + [change] which + [result]
Strengthened + [area] through + [method]
Delivered + [result] leading to + [impact]

She took these away for homework, with the plan of combining them with the bullet points in the coming weeks. This will help her prepare LinkedIn content while developing a clearer sense of how English expresses impact and achievement in corporate settings.

What the student experienced

She encountered new vocabulary directly relevant to her field.
She saw known words used in ways she had never imagined, and certainly beyond her ability to use on her own.
She realised that pronunciation was a major hurdle with the new words — and that the main suprasegmental challenge for her is linking.

Reflection

ChatGPT enabled me to process three Czech business documents into a set of English bullets and frames almost instantly. My role was to let my ideas unfold as I saw the language it had extracted, shaping it into tasks that engaged the student in sorting, selecting, and adapting.

It was wonderful to be able to tailor-make such a specific lesson for a student who needed to work with particular texts for a very particular purpose. For me to read the documents in Czech (which I could have done) and identify areas of language that could become teaching points while also serving her need to update her LinkedIn presence would have taken me a whole morning. Instead, it took about 30 minutes to produce this focused, customised lesson.

In the future, she will be able to produce LinkedIn content while also developing a clearer grasp of English corporate language. The result of this first attempt was a strong start, and the student was delighted.

The Versatile ELT Blog

Vocabulary Teaching today: A Comedy in Three Acts

Act I: The Tragedy of the Gap-Fill

Act II: Enter tomboy

Act III: Learning How to Learn

Curtain Call