Kokand state pedagogical institute named after mukimi foreign language and literature

CHAPTER 2. PRACTICAL PART

II.l. HOW TO LEARN VOCABULARY EFFECTIVELY

Finally, as we’re talking about Lexical Resource and I have spent all this time warning you about bad advice and alluding to the sorts of things you should and shouldn’t know, it is only fair that I tell you how to actually improve your vocabulary. [There is a full article on that here if you want to dive deeper and get more tips.]

Let me start by acknowledging that this is a vast topic and it also is impossible to cater to everyone because we all have different learning styles. But in my many years of teaching, I have gained a lot of experience in this field, so I would like to share some ideas.
In the beginning, you will probably learn vocabulary best through simple means such as learning words by looking at pictures, or by memorising lists of words translated from your own language. This is great to begin with, but when you reach a more advanced level, it will not be very helpful. For one thing, you won’t know how to use them, and for another there might be some subtle aspects of the word’s meaning that you don’t quite understand.

A 2011 research paper by Joseph Mukoroli showed that there are 5 stages to learning a word:

1. 
   The student has no knowledge about the word.
   
2. 
   The student has a general sense of the word.
   
3. 
   The student has a narrow, context-bound knowledge about the word.
   
4. 
   The student has a basic knowledge of the word and is able to use it in many appropriate situations.
   
5. 
   The student has a rich, de-contextualized knowledge of the word and can use it in various appropriate situations.
   

For IELTS, of course, using a word correctly and accurately is the most important thing, so you need to reach stage 5 for each word in your vocabulary. To stick with our topic of crime, the word “recidivism” could be quite useful. It is certainly an uncommon word as it has a quite limited meaning. If you were to use it correctly, it would surely help you but if you used it incorrectly, it would do the opposite. First of all, you must know that it is a noun. We cannot use it as a verb. We often use it with the word “rate” and that is very important to know.

In the British Council’s guide to Lexical Resource, collocation is the first thing mentioned, which hints at its importance. The word “collocation” means how words go together. It is a really challenging thing for learners, and a 2012 paper in the Journal of Studies in Education called it “One of the most problematic areas for foreign language learning,” and highlighted that it was essential for achieving “native like fluency.” Even if you used “recidivism” as a noun and applied it more or less to its correct meaning, it would still not help you much unless you used it with the words to which it naturally collocates.

Thus, we can say something like:

When considering the issue of prison reform, people should always keep recidivism rates in mind.

Here, the word is used correctly. It is specific to the topic. It is collocated with words that it naturally appears alongside, and it is grammatically correct. In other words, it checks all the boxes.

So how do you learn to use vocabulary in this way?

Well, there are two main ways:

Learn lists of vocabulary and then study their use carefully.

Learn words from context.
If you learn lists of vocabulary, I strongly recommend that you take each word that you learn and study it individually rather than just memorising it. Look it up in a dictionary to find out its meaning, then Google it and read articles of different sorts in order to find out how it is used. Ask yourself, “Is this formal or informal?” Take note of collocations. Think about its part of speech. Always make sure that the sources you use for this are professional or at least written by native speakers because there’s a lot of rubbish online. Google News is a great way of doing it because most of the stuff you’ll find there is from professional journalists.

The other method, learning from context, is probably more effective in terms of increasing your accuracy, but it is quite a bit slower. I generally recommend this for my students who are already at about band 7 or higher. This method involves making note of words that you encounter whilst reading or listening, then going through much the same process as described for the first approach. It works well because you already encounter the word in its natural form. This makes it more likely that you will use it correctly than if you plucked it from a list or a dictionary.