text: what kind of activities can teachers propose in order to improve their students' english vocabulary ?   reading will definitely help, especially if it is from a variety of writers, genres and time periods.  word of the day type things work for some people, but others totally blow it off.  i had a teacher once who gave us extra credit for finding vocabulary/ word of the day words in our books.  you could do something similar for students who take the time to learn a random word from the dictionary well enough to use it, or teach it to the class.