Suggestions for learning vocabulary

Oh dear. It’s that time of year – the clocks have gone back  which means that it’ll soon be getting dark at four o’clock in the afternoon. Of course, at this time of year it is traditional for everyone to complain about this. Every year the news programmes are full of people saying that we should stay on summer time throughout the winter. The official line (the argument put forward by the government) is that when we move the clocks back we have lighter mornings, which makes it safer for children walking to school. I heard one person on the radio complaining about the time change saying “We move from a nation of happy people to a nation of sad people when the clocks change!”

Vocabulary is definitely key to improving your language skills. Despite knowing this, students are often disorganised about their vocabulary learning. If you are serious about expanding your vocabulary then you need to have a strategy about how you are going to do this. Unless you are very lucky, it won’t magically happen on its own. You will need to think about which words you are going to learn, how you will record them, and how you will remember them. Probably you are going to need a note-book which you can write words in and revise from.  Here’s a very useful source indeed on vocabulary learning from University of Toronto, Scarborough.

The Academic Word List at the University of Plymouth

British sports fans will have been following the Wimbledon tennis championship over the past few days. It is a very ‘British’ event (with strawberries and cream) and it is traditional for a British player to do quite well and then get beaten. It was no different this year only our current best player is really pretty good and people thought it might be different this time – which is what everybody says every time the tournament comes round! Our current best player is Scottish – which means he has far more chance of winning than if he was English!

One way or another you have to expand your vocabulary to have a good command of English. If you are studying at university it is probably a good idea for you to be aware of the Academic Word List and you can see a few VOCABULARY posts about the AWL if you scroll down the page a little on the right. My colleague Ricky Lowes at the University of Plymouth has been doing some work on academic vocabulary activities. Ricky says:

This is a new website, developed by a teacher, Ricky Lowes, and a technical expert, Mark Pannell, who both work at the university, to help international students to learn academic vocabulary.
We know that vocabulary learning requires a lot of time and effort. We know you need to work consistently, little by little, day after day. We provide advice, information and exercises on academic vocabulary to guide your learning.
The website is designed by teachers and is structured to support your learning. You can think of it as being like a book, only more interactive. It is designed to be simple and easy to navigate. It has many links to useful resources on the internet as well as pages which have been designed by us.
Enjoy the site and please let us know what you think of it by using the Contact Us link. The site is still being developed and your ideas are important to us.

The activities are here.

Vocabulary learning

A few readers have been asking about vocabulary learning. Expanding your vocabulary is essential to improving your English! But what words should you learn? You cannot just study the dictionary! The only way to learn new words is to get engaged in talking about some topics in English. What I mean by this is finding an interesting topic and reading, listening, talking and writing about that topic. You need to get a vocabulary notebook to note down the new words you see. Write a definition and an example sentence using the new word in your notebook. Carry your notebook around with you so that you can look at it whenever you have a chance (when you are waiting for the bus!) and so you will see those new words again and again and they will start to become part of your active vocabulary. You need to take the long view – don’t try to learn too many new words at a time. Five new words a day is plenty. Five new words a day over a year is a lot of words!

So my advice today is to take a look at the ISSUES forum and join the GM food debate! ISSUES is a new forum which I have started for English language practise. The first ISSUE is GM food. I just can’t decide whether I should welcome or oppose scientists changing the DNA of our food. That’s why I would like to know more about this issue. Why don’t you join me in finding out about this topic and practise your English too? The forum with some reading and a news report on GM food is here.

Improving your vocabulary

Did you know that English now has a million words? A million! You’re probably thinking – well I am anyway – how on earth anyone has managed to count them all! A company in the USA which analyses words on the internet claims that a new word is created every 98 minutes and that means we are coming up to our millionth word. I think that company must be congratulating itself on a very good publicity campaign because I have heard this story in lots of places (even though it’s nonsense!).

However, it does a good job of reminding us how important it is to learn more and more vocabulary when we want to improve our language proficiency. One good way of doing this is to read regularly, and to read English which uses appropriate new words. Good resources may even have appropriate new vocabulary already highlighted and picked out for you with definitions provided. Today’s link is to a very good resource which I would definitely recommend you to make regular use of. It’s the “Words in the News” part of the BBC Learning English site. You’ll see a news article with an audio report, and key vocabulary highlighted and explained below. The article in this section is, of course, about the millionth word in English! Check out the resource here.