I had already been doing some story telling and dialogues with my student to help him memorise the huge bank of idioms that must be learnt at proficiency level. At first he didn’t believe he could make up stories, but he soon got the hang of it.
So it was upon his request that we made up this story from a dreaded word list.
In order to write the story I had to explain the meanings of the words.
In the process of writing the story, the experience was enriched in many ways. One way was that we found we could look at multiple meaning words and choose which meaning to fit into the story – that was enlightning for him, as creating a sentence with alternative meanings is so engaging in comparision to reading a list of synonyms. It has also shown him how to feel more comfortable with the language, how to experiment, and what is natural in English expression.
We also threw in some mafia colloquialisms, mixed with the formal words, so that was fun for him, as many words he knew from tv and I added others to his web of mob movie knowledge.