Strategies You Can Use to Enhance Your Vocabulary
To improve your vocabulary, you must have a game plan. The best way to get this game plan is to develop strategies that can lead you to success. Reading is the foundation that will allow you to increase your skills. When you seek out information on your own by reading, you are referred to as being an active learner. Many students increase their vocabulary by participating in class reading projects.
Introduction
The first strategy in building your vocabulary is to comprehend what you read. When many people read books or papers, they are just going through the motions. Once they’re done reading, they don’t know much more than they did when they started.
The reason for this is because they didn’t take the time to comprehend the information they read. You can empower your vocabulary by increasing the words that you’re able to recognized. As you do this, you will find that it becomes faster and easier to read, even when you are covering material that is complex. There is a direct correlation between how much you read and the size of your vocabulary. The people who read the most are generally the people who will have the greatest vocabulary skill. Below are some strategies that you can use the maximize your vocabulary capabilities. Each strategy will be sufficient for various situations.
Looking at the Context
This is the first strategy that can allow you to become a master at building up your vocabulary. With this strategy, you can learn what a word means by the context of the word in the manuscript. If you read a word that you don’t understand, you will often find that the words which surround this word will often tell you what it means. It is important to realize that looking at the context can be further broken down into three additional methods.
These methods are synonyms, comparison clues, and the definition. The definition is the easiest to use. The author will tell you what the word means, and it will be done on the same page where the word appears.
With the synonym, the author will combine the unknown word with words they are similar to it. This will help the reader better understand what the word means. With the comparison clue, the unknown word will be used in conjunction with a word that is familiar.
By comparing the unknown word with the word you know, this can allow you to learn the meaning of the unknown word. While some books may only use one of these methods, other books may use all of them. They are very useful in allowing the reader to increase their vocabulary, and the author takes a vested interest in helping them.
Word Structure
The structure of an unknown word is very important in helping you build up your vocabulary. To understand this, you must look at the structure of the word, as well as its properties. One method for doing this is to break the unknown word into parts. If the word is long, this may be somewhat difficult. Many words are compound, meaning they are two separate words they have been joined together. By breaking them apart, and looking at them individually, you can see what the word means. A good example of this would be the word "bookkeeper."
By breaking this word into "book" and "keeper," you can see that a bookkeeper is someone that is a keeper of books. It must be noted that this works mostly on simple words, and will not work on long words that are much more complex. You can also determine the meaning of a word by either its suffix or its prefix.
An example of this word would be "microscope." Another word structure strategy is to break down words into separate words that you can pronounce. There are a sizeable number of unknown words that you can figure out by using the word structure strategy. However, there are many situations where this strategy will not work.
Word Mapping
A word map is an organizer that allows you to think about a word in a specific manner. To create a word map, you will first want to place the word in the center of a map. After you’ve done this, you will want to fill the other parts of the map with pictures, as well as antonyms and synonyms of the word. These are the three methods that are commonly used to enhance your vocabulary.
