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Great Vocabulary Tips and Strategies

Building Your English Vocabulary – Part 2

Part 1     Part 3

After you have read about creating your vocabulary notebook in Part 1, you are now welcome to review the following tips to aid you in building your English vocabulary. The notebook may suffice as the sole infrastructure onto which many other memory techniques can be added. As you gain more experience with learning vocabulary, you will be able to figure out which strategies and tips best work for you. The WhiteSmoke ESL software is a great help with vocabulary, as it provides a wealth of synonyms and text enrichment suggestions, accompanied by a powerful dictionary, thesaurus, and multi-language translator. Remember that good English writing relies not only on abiding to the rules of English grammar, but also on varied and appropriate vocabulary choices.

Tip 1: How (con)texts help us remember words

As ESL/EFL learners, you read articles and stories to improve reading comprehension. Taking new words and expressions out of the context of an article is actually one of the best ways to memorize vocabulary because you can use the word list as a memory aid to reconstruct the text. The separate words are part of the bigger story, and we all find it easier to remember stories than word lists.

In addition to marking words and scribbling notes on your textbooks or work sheets, you can also buy inexpensive paperback versions of famous novels (such as Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations”), so as to be able to circle new words or mark interesting phrases while reading. Refer to your dictionary only after finishing a full chapter so as not to disturb the reading flow.

Moving on, as you read a text, mark new or interesting words and expressions with a highlighter (the best for this is yellow) and continue reading, while guessing the meanings from the context. For understanding a paragraph’s main idea you do not have to know every word. However, if you want to increase your vocabulary, simply go back to what you have marked in yellow and look for translations suitable to the context you have, as there may be many meanings to one word. Prefer to ransack your dictionary after you have read a whole section at least once, to get the general idea.

In your two-way, bi-lingual dictionary, choose the correct definitions and translations that suit the context of the original text. You may consider scanning the other definitions and expressions for your target word. When you find another definition for your word or some expressions you may find useful in the future, add them to the lists in your vocabulary notebook (see Part 1), even if they have nothing to do with your context. However, consider not going overboard with this “lexical enthusiasm” as you may still not be able to use more advanced vocabulary items you find in the dictionary. Try to get a feel for the vocabulary level and register you are currently at and devote more time for actively using the words you already have in your English writing.

Tip 2: Remember that words are never alone!

1. As words have different meanings in different contexts, do not just copy words in isolation but use the full phrases as used in the source, when creating your notebook word lists. Words are always used as parts of phrases. Some of these appear more frequently in usage and become “fixed chunks” or collocations. For example, the verb take has numerous meanings that go beyond its basic denotation of “obtaining something”. Therefore, you should add the whole phrases with take as they come along in your course of study, such as:

phrase	meaning in a sentence using an underlined synonym
take off	The plane soared to the sky.
take a nap	She slept for a couple of hours.
take into consideration	Her boss thought about it carefully.
take on a new employee	The company hired new workers.
take turns playing the game	They alternated while playing.

2. Collocations (words often appearing together as a set phrase) will help you use vocabulary correctly, as in:
"He was stung by a swarm of bees,” rather than "He was stung by a large group of bees.”

3. The following are examples of collocations representing various parts of speech combinations:

Combined Parts of Speech	Examples
verb + noun	throw a party, accept responsibility
adjective + noun	armed forces, grim determination
verb + adjective + noun	make new friends, take preventive measures
adverb + verb	strongly believe, hardly hear
adverb + adjective	definitely worthwhile, completely useless
adverb + adjective + noun	a fully air-conditioned car
adjective + preposition	(be) aware of, (be) talented at, (be) anxious about
noun + noun	television set, alarm clock

Even with simple words such as fruit, you can create your own phrases to aid memory, such as

a yellow banana, a red apple ,a green pear

4. Always write the words together with their prepositions within a “word formula.” Getting those prepositions right is one of the trickiest challenges in learning a language, so always add them to your vocabulary lists where needed.

take care of somebody/ something (or sb/sth respectively)
be patient of with sb/sth
be interested in sb/sth

Tip 3: Group it up with theme-related vocabulary

Another great way to pick up more vocabulary is using themed vocabulary resources, especially for basic concrete concepts, such as “colors,” “the human body,” “vegetables,” “farm animals,” “kitchen activities,” or “at the bank.” These are usually presented accompanied by a big illustrative picture visualizing all the word items. Picture dictionaries and textbooks usually have such helpful visual spreads.

When it comes to more abstract themes, such as “values” or “crime and punishment”, you can find specially written texts that include many related words and expressions, followed by vocabulary activities. Again, it is the context of the larger picture that is the main channel helping your word memory. Both concrete and abstract vocabulary themes are usually followed by vocabulary activities that further strengthen their usage and memorization.

Tip 4: Come join the (word) family

Use your knowledge of word grammar to enlarge your working vocabulary. Knowledge of the different parts of speech and the suffixes that are used to create them will have you boosting up your word bank. For example, if you encounter the word evasive and look it up in the dictionary, you can benefit from the opportunity and look up its derivatives (other parts of speech and related words from the same root, comprising its “word family”), thus resulting in the following word set:

noun	verb	adjective	adverb
evasion	evade	evasive	evasively

In addition, knowledge of prefixes, suffixes and word roots (often Latin and Greek roots) will help you both decipher and memorize a word, as you analyze it into its constituting elements.

prefix	prefix	root	suffix	suffix
un	pre	dict	able
	in	act	iv	ity
	omni	potent	ial	ism
	extra	ordin	ar	ily

This is the second part of our vocabulary strategies review, click here for Part 3.