You taught ten words on Monday. By the next lesson, half are gone. So you review, and the review itself feels like a slog: you say the word, they nod, nobody actually recalls anything. The problem usually isn't the students. It's that the review is built to be recognised, not retrieved.
Two levers decide whether review sticks: whether students pull the word from memory, and whether the review is spread out over time. Get those right and the format almost picks itself.
Match the review to the slot
| When | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Lesson warm-up | Match Pairs or a quick Quiz | Fast, low-stakes retrieval of last lesson's set |
| Mid-lesson check | Type the Answer | Forces production, exposes the words they only half-know |
| End of a unit | Mixed Quiz across several lessons | Interleaves old and new so nothing quietly fades |
| A week later | Re-test the same set | The spacing is the point, not the novelty |
Re-showing the full list each lesson feels thorough and does almost nothing. Recognition is easy and fools everyone into thinking the word is known. Make them produce it, and space the re-tests out.
That "space it out" instinct is one of the most robust findings in the study of memory.
Over a century ago Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped the forgetting curve: newly learned material drops away fast, then slower. The fix he and everyone since have confirmed is the spacing effect: the same amount of review, spread across days, sticks far better than the same review crammed into one sitting. So the highest-leverage thing you can do isn't a fancier game. It's re-testing last week's words this week, on purpose.
Ebbinghaus, and the spacing effect.
The practical version: keep a set alive and re-run it a week later. Here's what one looks like as a quick retrieval game.
A review set in action
Match each phrasal verb with get to its meaning.
0 of 8 matched. Tap a term, then its match.
The through-line
Review isn't a different activity from teaching; it's the part that decides whether the teaching held. Pick the format by whether you want retrieval or production, and space the re-tests. If you're weighing which base format to build the review from, here's how flashcards, quiz, and match pairs each train a different skill.
Sources & further reading
- The spacing effect. Why spread-out review beats massed review.
- The testing effect. Why retrieval practice beats re-reading.
Written by
Builder at Lingoken
By day I build, and I love teaching kids to code. On weekends I dance, contemporary and Kathak. Languages are the thing I keep coming back to: I grew up between a few (Sindhi, Hindi, Marathi, English) and I'm still happily stumbling through Spanish, Telugu, and Malayalam. That slow, enjoyable business of actually learning a language convinced me practice has to be something you want to do, which is what we're building at Lingoken. I write here about making language activities people genuinely enjoy.
Build your first game free
Turn your next lesson into a game your students actually want to play. No account needed to try it, and no student logins.
Pick a template