SOON: Trios

The Trios exercise is a vocabulary activity designed to practice and expand learners’ understanding of words with multiple meanings (polysemy or homonyms). In this activity, students are given three sentences with a missing word. Their task is to identify the one word that completes all three sentences, while noting that it carries a different meaning in each case.

For example, in the following set of sentences:

    The children played by the _____ in the forest.

    Flowers bloom in the _____ every year.

    The mattress is too hard because one of the _____s is broken.

the common word is “spring”, which has three different meanings: a natural water source, a season, and a mechanical coil.

Here are some advantages of this type of exercise:

Vocabulary Development

• Deepens word knowledge – learners move beyond a single meaning and discover the full semantic range of a word.
• Prevents confusion – by contrasting different uses, students avoid mixing up meanings in real contexts.
• Promotes retention – generating three contexts helps anchor the word in memory more strongly.
• Encourages precision – students learn to select the right meaning based on context.
• Builds lexical flexibility – one word becomes usable in many different situations.

 Cognitive & Linguistic Benefits

• Strengthens semantic awareness – students recognize how meaning shifts depending on context.
• Improves problem-solving – learners must think creatively.
• Supports critical thinking – comparing and contrasting meanings sharpens analytical skills.
• Raises awareness of ambiguity – helps students understand jokes, puns, and figurative language.
• Develops transfer skills – knowledge of multiple meanings aids reading comprehension and listening.

 Communicative Value

• Reflects real-life usage – many common words (e.g. “run,” “light,” “set”) are highly polysemous.
• Improves contextual guessing – students learn to deduce meaning from surrounding words.
• Supports fluency – students gain confidence using a single word flexibly across topics.

Our Trios module contains almost 3,000 sentences grouped in ten thematic groups. We hope that it will help the advanced learner expand their vocabulary and their use of idiomatic English.