Vocabulary

Once you’ve chosen a word to learn, what’s the best way to do that? What’s the most effective strategy for learning new vocabulary words?

An interesting book I read in graduate school, Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse, claims that there is no single best way to learn new vocabulary words. As Folse says, “It does not seem to matter so much what students do with new vocabulary provided that they do something and that they do it consistently. In other words, find the method that works best for you and then keep using it.

Overall, the best vocabulary learners, according to research, followed these steps:

• They were instructed on how to learn vocabulary (something I hope my blog posts can help with).
• They set specific learning goals for a set period of time.
• They selected the most appropriate learning strategies (more on that later).
• They periodically evaluated their strategies and used a combination of strategies to improve their effectiveness.
• They regularly tested their mastery of vocabulary words.
• They managed their time and made sure to devote a set amount of time to learning vocabulary during their English studies.

So how about those learning strategies? If there’s no single best way, what are my recommendations for effective vocabulary studies?

I personally prefer a fairly structured approach to learning vocabulary. From my own experience with French, keeping a notebook of new words and reviewing it regularly really helped me to acquire an extensive vocabulary over a period of years. With new technology and mobile apps, it’s no longer necessary to actually write words down on paper, but I believe you should store them somewhere.

To learn each individual word, I recommend four steps.

First, establish a clear definition of the word. For that, research shows that using a dictionary is definitely better than trying to guess the meaning of the word from its context. Should you use a bilingual or English-only dictionary? Although many ESL teachers frown on bilingual dictionaries, I think they’re usually necessary for beginners and even intermediate students. Just make sure you use a high-quality dictionary from a reputable publisher, or a trusted online dictionary. If you are a more advanced student, I would also recommend that you identify common collocations for your target words. Collocations are pairs or groups of words that regularly occur together. By using an online resource such as this, you can identify, for example, when to use responsible for and responsible to. This is a particularly important skill for the IELTS.

Second, place your target word in the context of a sentence. English-only dictionaries are a great resource for such sentences. When possible, if you’re recording a sentence along with the definition, use a sentence that has a personal meaning. For example, my boss is responsible for preparing reports for the managers.

Third, connect the new word to a concept – something that will help you remember it. To do this, I highly recommend that you use a mental image and not the definition in your native language. For example, if you’re learning the word responsible, create a mental image of your boss preparing a report at her desk. With this mental image, you’ll be less likely to rely on your mental translator when you’re speaking or writing that word.

Fourth, explore your word. Is it related to other words you know? This would be a great time to add it to those groups of words I talked about in my last post. So, for example, perhaps you have a group of “adjectives to describe good workers.” You could add responsible to other words like diligent, hard-working, trustworthy, and honest. In addition, you should also learn other words in the same word family. If you are studying responsible (an adjective), you should also learn responsibility (a noun) and responsibly (an adverb). Finally, as you become more advanced, you’ll want to take a look at the morphology of your target word.

Morphology is the study of a word’s structure. Some understanding of English morphology, especially the Latin and Greek roots of English words, can greatly expand your vocabulary. Did you know, for example, that 90% of scientific words in English have Latin and Greek roots? I’ll discuss that in a later post. For now, just try incorporating some of these ideas into your vocabulary learning!

In an earlier post, I discussed how researchers have found that learning vocabulary from word lists can actually be very effective. In this post, I’d like to talk specifically about the Fry Word List of 1000 high-frequency words (for beginners) and the Academic Word List (for intermediate and advanced learners).

The Fry Word List presents the most commonly occurring “sight words” in English. Developed by Dr. Edward Fry for American schoolchildren, this list contains the words most frequently used in reading material for Grades 3 – 9. The list is divided into ten sublists of 100 words each, with the sublists arranged in order of frequency; in other words, sublist 1 presents the most common words while sublist 10 contains the least common of those 1000 words. This organization makes it easy for students to progress smoothly and logically in their vocabulary learning.

The Fry words are called “sight words” because readers should be able to recognize these words “on sight.” Teachers sometimes contrast these words with phonics words, which are generally words that can be sounded out phonetically (like con-tract or bath-tub). But, in fact, both methods are useful to develop reading skills and, in American schools, are usually combined in reading classes.

The Fry Word List is very helpful for beginning English learners because these words are so common. They account for about 90% of the words in a typical book or website. Also, you can Google “Fry Word List” and find many online resources for learning and reviewing them. Although these are often targeted for American children, there’s no reason why adult English learners can’t use them. I highly recommend that beginners use this word list along with a good beginners dictionary like the Oxford Picture Dictionary.

The Academic Word List (AWL) is aimed for intermediate and advanced students. Like the Fry list, the AWL also contains frequently occurring words, but these words appear in a wide range of academic texts. However, don’t be misled by the word “academic”: these are not technical or specialist words like protozoa or photosynthesis, but rather words like create and occur.

The AWL contains 570 different “word families,” with a headword (such as evident) and other forms of that word (such as evidenced, evidence, evidently, and evidential). Like the Fry list, the AWL contains ten sublists; in the AWL, the first nine sublists have 60 word families while sublist 10 has 30. The AWL has also organized the sublists by frequency, making it easier to manage your learning since the words on the first sublist are much more common than those on the last.

Studying the AWL offers a number of benefits. First, there’s a wide range of online resources that provide user-friendly exercises and quizzes to test your knowledge. In addition, you can master different forms of the same word, which is one of the biggest challenges for English learners. I frequently hear students confuse words like intelligent and intelligence and economic and economical. It makes sense to differentiate these words when you first learn the headword. Finally, as the developers of the AWL point out, “Just over 94% of the words in the AWL occur in 20 or more subject areas. This principle ensures that the words in the AWL are useful for all learners, no matter what their area of study or what combination of subjects they take at tertiary (university and above) level.” This means that you’ll be encountering these words again and again in the more advanced texts you’ll need to read for TOEFL, IELTS, or higher education in an English-speaking university.

With at least 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, you may be wondering how to choose which words to learn. Which words are going to give you the most “bang for your buck”? What’s the most effective way to add words to your ever-growing vocabulary?

Although nowadays some teachers view structured vocabulary lists as old-fashioned and boring, they’re actually very helpful. In fact, research shows that presenting unrelated words in short lists, without any context, can actually improve learning.

Two lists that I recommend are the Fry Word List of 1000 high-frequency words (for beginners) and the Academic Word List (for intermediate and advanced learners). These are widely recognized by ESL professionals as two of the most scientifically compiled and comprehensive word lists for English learners. These lists are so valuable that I’ve devoted a separate post to discussing their features and benefits. If you are a more advanced learner, and especially if you’re in an academic setting, you might also want to check out the newer Academic Vocabulary List.

Because they are so commonly used in English, another helpful group of words to learn is phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs consist of a common verb and one, two, or even three short words that look like prepositions or adverbs but are actually called particles. The English Club has helpful lists of these phrases and there are plenty of online resources for studying them.

But should you study unrelated words from a list or words that are organized into what we call “semantic groups” … such as days of the week, colors, vehicles, and vegetables? Research on this subject has been very interesting. It’s true that grouping related known words can help us retain them in our short-term memory. However, researchers have found that foreign language learners actually have more trouble learning words that are presented in semantic groups. And yet this is the way vocabulary words are usually presented in textbooks!

NOT studying organized “semantic groups” of related words may seem counter-intuitive (which means not what we would expect to be true). But I believe it makes sense. To this day, I frequently confuse the French words mardi (Tuesday) and jeudi (Thursday) and gauche (left) and droit (right) … probably because I learned them together. And, as I pointed out before, learning words from a scientifically compiled vocabulary list like the Fry Word List or the Academic Word List ensures that you focus on the most common words in English texts.

My suggestion, if you want to group “like words” together, would be to develop your own categories of vocabulary words and add new words to the ones you already know. Your categories would be based on what you yourself need to achieve your goals. For example, if you are preparing for a test of English like TOEFL, I would compile a collection of words you can use to replace to say in phrases such as “the professor says.” Your group might include to discuss, focus on, point out, elaborate on, and state. On the other hand, if you are preparing to study statistics in an English-speaking university, you might group together words such as analyze, data, estimate, derive, and factor.

Finally, in addition to using a list, you may also want to gather your new vocabulary words from material that you listen to or read. It’s a bit of a challenge when you’re listening, since you may not know how to spell the unknown word (unless you have captioning on a video). Your English teacher or English-speaking friend might be able to help here. And whether you’re listening or reading, focus on those words that you encounter more than once. If it’s a specialized word, it may not be a priority to learn. But if you meet up with it fairly often, your fluency will definitely improve if you add it to your vocabulary list.

So now that I’ve discussed several ways that you can collect new words to study, what’s the best way to actually learn them? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Everyone learning a new language wants, and needs to, acquire new words. Words are the building blocks of our language. Without improving your vocabulary, you won’t be able to read, write, speak, or understand what you hear.

Given that learning new words is essential, how do we do this efficiently and effectively? In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing various aspects of mastering vocabulary. And I need to give a shout-out right now to Professor Kevin Flanigan, who teaches a course on vocabulary with Great Courses Plus and who has been inspiring me with new ideas during each lecture he gives.

First of all, it’s helpful to think about new words as if they were strangers who eventually become friends. By understanding this concept, you realize that learning a new vocabulary word isn’t a you-either-know-it-or-you-don’t situation. Our familiarity with words grows over time, just like a friendship.

Think about it this way. When you first encounter a new word in English, it’s like meeting someone for the first time. You might figure out a few things about this person from the people around him, or make some guesses about her based on what she’s wearing, but basically this is a stranger. Same with new words. We look at the context surrounding the word, notice things like whether it ends with an – ing or an – s, but we don’t really know what the word means.

However, if we spend time with this word, if we keep meeting up with it, and if we pay attention to it when we meet it in various settings, it’s like that person you keep running into at the bus-stop or your university class. The word is no longer a stranger. You know some things about it.

Finally, you make friends with that word. By encountering it enough times, or by looking it up in a dictionary, you feel more and more confident that you know what it means. And finally, you’re ready to actually use it – in writing or in speech. If it’s a best friend, you’ll even use it without needing to run it through that mental translator in your head: the one that takes words in your native language and processes them into English before you write or speak.

To help quantify your understanding of a particular word, you can use this scale developed by Edgar Dale, an educational researcher. From 1 to 4, he ranks vocabulary knowledge like this:

1. I do not know the word, and I have never seen it before.
2. I’ve heard of the word before, but I’m not sure what it means.
3. I know the word and can recognize and understand it while reading, but I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable using it in writing or speech.
4. I know the word well and can use it in writing and speaking.

In my next blog post, I’d like to discuss how to choose your friends in the first place. How do you most effectively select the right words to get to know? After that, I’ll offer four really helpful steps to help you move from 1 to 4 on the familiarity scale and turn strange words into friends.

Adjectives are my favorite English words.

If all the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, etc.)  came to a party, the adjectives would be the most fun to have around.

Think about going to a party. The day after, your friend asks you how it was.

Well, if you had a good time, you have so many English adjectives to describe it. It was wonderful, amazing, awesome, fantastic, marvelous, energizing, entertaining, terrific, stupendous.

But if you had a bad time, maybe it was dreary, boring, dull, lackluster, depressing, awful, unpleasant, dreadful, horrible.

The more adjectives you learn, the better you will be able to describe moods, situations, experiences, places, and people.

So this blog post is going to be a little different. I’m going to be regularly updating it with new adjectives that would be a great addition to your vocabulary “toolbox.” If you have a favorite adjective, please include it in the “comments” section. Remember to keep checking back on this post, because I’ll be adding new words whenever I can.

Check Out These Adjectives

cutting-edge

So the last couple of days, I was attending some workshops at the University of Kentucky in a brand-new classroom building. There were six overhead projectors with automatic screens, so everyone could see what was being shown. There were speakers at every table so that people from one table could hear the people speaking from the table on the other side of the room. There was a central docking station for everyone’s plug so every participant could use their laptop.

This is what I would call a cutting-edge classroom. All the technology is the latest and the greatest. Cutting-edge is a wonderful adjective to use when you want to describe a new piece of technology, a new marketing plan, or a new way of doing things. Some good synonyms for cutting-edge include:

state-of-the-art

innovative

trendsetting

revolutionary

ambivalent

I like the word ambivalent because it often expresses how I feel. It means that you have mixed feelings about something. You can have ambivalent feelings about a person … some things about them you like, and some you don’t. You can have ambivalent feelings about an experience, like I’m having right now.

I used the photo above to express my ambivalence about traveling to Paris tomorrow! I’m excited and nervous. I’m a little scared of flying and I’m worried about missing my plane. I’m happy about visiting my favorite city and a little unhappy about the hassle of traveling. I’m looking forward to seeing my daughter, who’s going to come from London to see me, but I also know I’ll miss my husband and pets.

When you are asked your opinion about something, you can use the word ambivalent when you see both good and bad points. In another blog post, I wrote about what to say (or write) when you see two sides to an issue. So another expression you can use to indicate this is, “I’m ambivalent about this issue.”

vertiginous

Vertigo is the English word for that feeling you have when you are way up high and you look down and feel dizzy. Vertiginous is the adjective formed from that noun. It describes something that is extremely high or steep, and that may make you feel a little dizzy, scared, or sick when you look down. This is the view from our apartment in Paris. We are on the sixth floor (and the bedroom is on the seventh floor). I don’t like heights, but I do like being up high and watching everything going on in the streets below. When I look down, I think the view is rather vertiginous. Another adjective we can use is dizzying or, if you want to use a more general and common adjective, you can just say scary.

breathtaking

In English, when we talk about something that amazes us, we often say that it takes our breath away. You know that feeling … when your heart beats more quickly and your breathing becomes more rapid! So we turn that verb phrase into an adjective — breathtaking. We often use this word to describe views or sights or images. So this photo I took on a bridge in Paris shows a breathtaking view of a beautiful sunset over the River Seine. I love this adjective because it describes in a physical way the way we feel when we see something amazingly beautiful. Other adjectives we can use to mean the same thing are

spectacular

magnificent

amazing

stunning

incredible

magnificent

astounding

astonishing

awesome, and

awe-inspiring.

What breathtaking sights do you have in your country?