Let's talk about flashcards. Specifically, let's talk about why they're both the best thing that ever happened to language learners and the reason half your students plateau at a frustrating level of almost-fluency.
Flashcards are great. Spaced repetition is real, it works, and if you've been sleeping on it, you're leaving serious learning efficiency on the table. But here's the thing nobody tells you: a student who has reviewed 1,000 Anki cards might still freeze up when a native speaker talks too fast, or blank completely when they actually need to produce a word under pressure.
If you're teaching vocabulary online and your whole strategy is "here are some cards, swipe left or right," you're doing your students a disservice. A well-meaning one, but still.
Let's fix that.
The Flashcard Trap: Spaced Repetition Is Necessary, Not Sufficient
Spaced repetition is based on solid cognitive science — Hermann Ebbinghaus proved over a century ago that we forget information on a predictable curve, and that reviewing material at the right intervals dramatically slows that forgetting. This is genuinely powerful stuff.
But here's the problem: most flashcard systems only test recognition. You see the word, you remember the definition, you feel good about yourself, you swipe "Easy." Repeat.
What you've done is trained your brain to recognize a word when it's sitting alone in a white box with no context, no pressure, and all the time in the world. The real world is nothing like that. Real language is fast, messy, and full of words bumping into each other in unexpected ways.
Recognition and recall are different cognitive processes. Knowing that schnell means "fast" when it appears on a flashcard is not the same as being able to think of schnell when you're trying to say "hold on, can you speak a little faster?" in German. That second thing? That's the whole point of learning a language.
Context Is King: Vocabulary In Isolation vs. Vocabulary In Use
Consider two students. Student A has learned the word "ubiquitous" from a flashcard. Student B encountered it in a sentence: "Smartphones have become so ubiquitous that looking someone in the eye at dinner is practically a political act."
Which student is more likely to correctly use "ubiquitous" in their own writing? Student B, by a significant margin. They didn't just learn a word — they absorbed it in a specific emotional and semantic context. They have a memory hook. Student A has a definition.
This is why vocabulary in context isn't a nice-to-have — it's the whole game. When you teach vocabulary online, every word should come with:
- Example sentences — at least two, in different contexts
- Collocations — what words naturally travel with this one? (Make a decision, not do a decision)
- Connotations — is it formal? Ironic? Regional? Slightly rude?
- Word family connections — if they learn "persist," they should encounter "persistent," "persistence," and "persistently"
Teaching vocabulary in isolation is like handing someone a jigsaw piece and expecting them to see the picture. Context is the puzzle box.
The Active/Passive Gap: What Most Tutors Miss
Linguists distinguish between your receptive vocabulary (words you understand when you see or hear them) and your productive vocabulary (words you can actually use). The gap between these two is enormous for most learners — and tragically, most vocabulary instruction does almost nothing about it.
Here's a rough breakdown of how vocabulary works for most intermediate learners:
| Vocabulary Type | What It Means | Typical Size Gap |
|---|---|---|
| Passive / Receptive | You understand it when you see/hear it | Larger |
| Active / Productive | You can use it spontaneously when speaking or writing | Significantly smaller |
| The Gap | Words you'd recognize but never think to use | Often 60–80% of "known" words |
Your job as a tutor isn't just to fill the passive vocabulary bucket — it's to actively transfer words from passive to active. And that requires a very different kind of practice than flashcard review.
Spaced Repetition Done Right: Understanding SM-2
Before we talk about production exercises, a quick note on doing spaced repetition properly. The algorithm that powers most modern SRS (spaced repetition system) tools is called SM-2, developed by Piotr Woźniak in the late 1980s. Here's the short version of how it works:
Every time you review a card, you rate how hard it was (typically 0–5). The algorithm uses that rating to calculate when you should see the card again. Easy cards get pushed further and further into the future. Hard cards come back sooner. If you fail a card completely, it resets.
The key insight of SM-2 is that it's adaptive. It builds a model of each individual word in the learner's memory and schedules reviews to catch them just before they would have forgotten. This is not magic — it's math that works.
But here's what SM-2 was designed to track: recognition. You see the word, you rate how well you knew it. The algorithm doesn't know whether you can actually use the word in a sentence — it only knows whether you recognized it when prompted.
That's the limitation. That's the gap we need to bridge with deliberate production practice.
Production Exercises That Actually Make Vocabulary Stick
This is where the magic happens. If you want students to move words from "I'd recognize that" to "I actually say that," you need exercises that force production. Here are the most effective ones:
1. Cloze Exercises (Gap-Fill With Teeth)
The classic gap-fill, but done right. Don't just blank out random words — choose target vocabulary and build sentences where the context heavily implies the word, but doesn't give it away. "The politician's behavior was so ________ that even his supporters were embarrassed." Students have to retrieve the word, not just recognize it.
Level it up: Have students write their own cloze sentences for the words they're learning, then swap with a classmate. Creating the clue sentence forces them to deeply understand the word's usage.
2. Roleplay Scenarios
Give students a scenario where they need to use target vocabulary naturally. Teaching business English? Have them roleplay a client meeting where they must naturally use this week's words. The constraint is the point — it forces retrieval under pressure, which is exactly what real communication is like.
Online tutoring bonus: roleplay is actually really well-suited to video calls. You can play a character, put students on the spot, pause to debrief, and stay in the scenario or break out of it seamlessly. This is harder in a classroom.
3. Timed Writing Prompts
Give students 5 minutes to write something — a tweet, an email, a paragraph — and require them to use 5 specific target words naturally. The timer adds pressure. The constraint adds purpose. Artificial? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
Debrief together: read the sentences aloud, discuss whether the usage felt natural, and offer alternatives. This one exercise does more for active vocabulary development than a week of passive review.
4. Word Association Chains
Start with a target word and have students associate freely: "What words, images, or ideas connect to 'resilient'?" Then use those associations to build a short story or dialogue. This technique works because it builds the semantic network around the word, making it more retrievable in different contexts.
Tracking Vocabulary Progress: The Motivational Secret Weapon
Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough: learners who can see their vocabulary growing stay motivated longer. This sounds obvious, but most teaching setups have no visible progress metric for vocabulary. Students just feel like they've done some studying. That feeling is not enough.
Concrete vocabulary tracking serves multiple purposes:
- Motivation — "I know 340 words in this course" is far more satisfying than "I've done a lot of flashcards"
- Identifying weak spots — Which words keep coming back? Those need production practice, not more review
- Lesson planning — A tutor who can see which words a student struggles with can plan targeted sessions around real gaps
- Proof of value — For adult learners especially, concrete metrics justify the investment in lessons
The best vocabulary tracking systems tell you not just how many words a student knows, but how well they know them — distinguishing between words at various stages of the learning cycle, from first encounter to automatic use.
The Student Who Can Recite 500 Words But Can't Order a Coffee
Let me tell you about a failure mode I see constantly (and may have contributed to, in my earlier teaching days). It goes like this:
Student studies diligently. Builds an impressive Anki deck. Reviews every day. Tests well on written vocabulary quizzes. Flies through passive recognition exercises. Feels good about their progress.
Then they go to a country where the language is spoken. Or get on a video call with a native speaker. Or try to watch TV without subtitles. And they freeze. Words they "know" evaporate. They can understand about 40% of what's being said and produce maybe 20% of what they want to say.
They're demoralized. They feel like they "can't" learn languages. But the truth is simpler: they were never taught to use vocabulary under real conditions. They trained for the exam, not the game.
This is the difference between a student who has learned about words and a student who has internalized words. Internalization requires production, repetition across different contexts, and — crucially — some level of communicative pressure. You need to feel the need to find the word.
Online tutoring is uniquely positioned to create this. You can set up roleplay, create communicative constraints, react like a real human would, and adjust the pressure in real time. Use that.
How Tuton Helps You Put This Into Practice
If you're an independent tutor, building and tracking vocabulary curricula from scratch is genuinely hard. Spreadsheets get unwieldy, notes get lost, and there's no systematic way to know which words a student has really learned vs. which ones they've just seen a few times.
This is exactly the kind of friction that Tuton was built to eliminate. Tuton's vocabulary tracking system lets you log, categorize, and monitor vocabulary progress across all your students — with built-in spaced repetition scheduling that adapts to each learner's review history. You can see at a glance which words are due for review, which ones are being forgotten, and which ones have made the jump to active use.
Instead of scrambling to remember what you covered three sessions ago, Tuton keeps the full picture. You can tag words by topic, skill level, or lesson, and the system handles the scheduling while you focus on the thing you're actually good at: teaching.
It's the infrastructure layer for vocabulary instruction — the part that should be automatic so you can spend your energy on the production exercises, the roleplay, the real communication practice that actually moves the needle.
The Bottom Line
Flashcards and spaced repetition are not the enemy. They're a great tool — for the recognition layer of vocabulary learning. But they're not the whole solution, and treating them like they are is why so many language learners hit a ceiling that feels impenetrable.
Teach vocabulary in context. Mind the active/passive gap. Use production exercises that create the pressure of real communication. Track progress in a way that's visible and motivating. And build systems that let you do all of this without drowning in admin.
Your students deserve to actually use the language they're working so hard to learn. That's why they hired you.