10 Activities to Improve Your English Vocabulary
By Emile Dodds
This guide for students notes that although English has about a million words, most speakers know 20,000 of them, which is still a lot of words.
Dodds starts with six basic suggestions for learning vocabulary.
1. Try to learn vocabulary in context. This is more effective than practicing lists.
2. Remember that English words tend to have multiple meanings.
3. Vocabulary … means phrases, idioms and expressions.
4. Always try to guess the meaning of new vocabulary before you look it up.
5. Have a notebook to keep track of new vocabulary. Write the sentence that contains the word and underline the word.
6. Review your vocabulary notebook regularly.
The author then lists ten possible vocabulary building activities starting with the easiest ones.
Easy Activities:
1. Quiz time – Online quizzes such as this one from the Longman Dictionary
2. Word games – [advanced vocabulary] such these from Merriam Webster
3. Who said that? Use famous quotations to find new vocabulary
Medium-Effort Activities
4. Vocabulary hunt and write – find 5-10 new words in a short article. Copy the sentences and write a few other sentences.
5. The new word checklist that includes Seen it, Heard it, and Used it.
6. Make your own vocabulary quiz
7. Matching preposition Include the prepositions that are used with new words. Check a collocations website
8 Simple word challenge – Look for words like get and do that are used in combination with other words resulting in collocations that have different meanings.
Hard or Challenging Activities
9. The sales pitch – Listen to an advertisement and then create your own.
10. Vocabulary deep dive – Look up other definitions and the word origin of a word on your list.
Due to globalization, being able to communicate and publish research in English is essential for students around the world who are entering STEM fields. To help them learn the language as quickly as possible, it is important for educators to identify successful strategies. The Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) is a tool that has been used internationally for a long time to analyze these strategies.
