One of our teachers has assigned students oh, a rather large number of vocabulary words (over a hundred), and then worksheets where students have to match definitions to the words.
Now, happily, the students don't have to wade through all the vocab; he basically takes the next 15 or so in the list and scrambles the order of those fifteen so the students have to look up the word, and then scan the ten or fifteen definitions to find one that matches.
At first I thought this was an exercise in frustration and copying, but then I realized that while the students weren't going to start using foment and incorrigible in their daily conversations, that the language task of seeing which definitions matched was valuable and they did appreciate that "there's a word for that!" (and sometimes declare that "there's already a word for that - why use something big?").
Any ideas for helping them do this process more efficiently?