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.