Personal Vocabulary Notes
Joshua Kurzweil
Personal Vocabulary Notes (PVN) is a way of developing student vocabulary in a personalized way while encouraging them to become autonomous learners.
Overview
The basic activity is very straightforward. In and out of class encourage students to write words in their native language when they do not know how to say the English word.
Step 1.  Give students a daily journal or PVN note paper to record vocabulary items.  In my monolingual Japanese classes I write the following instructions:
PVN:  Personal Vocabulary Notes
If you donít know an English word, write the Japanese, show your partner, communicate, and then check the English later.
Step 2.  Tell students that the class will be "English only"
Step 3.  Engage students in some kind of fluency activity and encourage them to write words in L1 that they do not know how to say in English.
Step 4.  As homework have the students look up their PVN and find the English translations.  They then should write sentences using their PVN.  (To make a manageable workload teachers can ask students to choose just two or three PVN to make into sentences.)
Step 5.  The teacher collects the PVN, checks it, and hands it back the following class.
Step 6.  Students keep a section in their notebook for PVN and do follow up activities with it such as peer teaching and review activities.
In monolingual classes, students can simply show their PVN to communicate, but even in multilingual classes reading the word can be easier to understand than hearing it.   PVN can preserve the "all English" atmosphere in the classroom by acting as a "safety valve" to lower student frustration when they have difficulty expressing themselves.
Creating the Need
To effectively set up PVN in a class, the students must first feel the need to learn vocabulary.  A basic way to focus students and introduce PVN is to give them a fluency task which will require vocabulary that they do not have.  This activity needs to be adjusted to the student level.  For example, for a lower level class you might just have students describe their neighborhoods or what they did over the weekend.  For upper level classes you might have them explain a movie or a current event.  Many students have often developed the laudable habit of using only "easy English" to express their ideas, so it is important to encourage them to write PVN while they speak, assuring them that they both can use "easy English" and improve their vocabulary.  I often tell students that each lesson they must get at least five PVN per class.  If they do not manage to get five in class, I explain that they need to think of words they want to know outside of class.
Establishing a Routine
It is important to make PVN a habit in class which is easy and natural for students to do.  I have found that a daily journal with a section for PVN (along with class notes, homework, etc.) to be effective.  In this way, students are not searching for scraps of paper to write notes but will have an organized system for recording their PVN.  Whenever they are speaking in class I ask them to keep their journals out on the desks and can easily check if they are writing PVN.
It is also important to discourage dictionary use in class or at least during the communication activity as it disrupts the communicative task.  Students will often pull out their dictionaries or ask me how to say something in English.  In such situations, I just remind them that they can check later and that I do not want them to stop their conversations.  It can also be worth mentioning how many people look up a word, say it, then promptly forget it.
In addition to having students look words up, you can devote class time in which students ask you and their classmates how to say things in English.  Regardless of whether the teacher speaks the L1 or not, this activity can be tremendous in raising student awareness simply in showing how critical the context is in choosing the best vocabulary item.
It is important to clearly model how to look up words using bilingual and learner dictionaries.  You can also encourage students to ask each other for translations.  The important thing is to stress context, as students often just look up words and pick the first translation offered in their bilingual dictionaries.  Teachers should also model how to write example sentences.  Admonish students not to copy dictionary sentences and to make their sentences long enough to show the context.  I usually do this by stressing that they will not receive credit unless they use their PVN to express their own ideas.
Finally, I would note how the PVN routine also engages students in a kind of learner training.  Students learn how to be active and autonomous as they seek out language they want.  The PVN system then asks students to experiment with language, notice their mistakes, and then use it again in conversation.  As learner training it tends to be effective by creating pro-active habits instead of just "talking about" how to be an active learner.
Teacher Response/Feedback
The most important point to keep