You might have experienced a moment at the office or a social get-together where the conversation seemed beyond your reach. Perhaps you didn’t understand some words or the entire conversation. You might have been left wondering ‘how to improve my vocabulary’. The good news is that anyone can develop their vocabulary. All it takes is some effort and patience.
You might think that vocabulary is simply words. It does, however, delve a little deeper than that. In order to develop your word knowledge, you need to be aware of some of the different types of vocabulary (see Figure 1):
(Taken from Pikulski and Templeton (2004, p.2).)
Expressive vocabulary consists of words that we use when we speak or write. Receptive vocabulary, on the other hand, refers to words we confront when we listen or read (Allen, 2006). Most often, we require our expressive vocabulary knowledge to be far greater than our receptive vocabulary. With receptive vocabulary, we are receiving information and don’t require as much understanding. That is, you can often comprehend the gist of what another person is saying without understanding every word in a sentence or conversation. This is especially true because we understand a spoken message with non-verbal language and context clues.
Both listening and speaking is referred to as oral vocabulary, whilst reading and writing denotes literate vocabulary (Pikulski and Templeton, 2004). Apart from word meanings, oral vocabulary particularly relies upon correct pronunciation. Confusion and misunderstanding can result when words are pronounced incorrectly. Hearing a word said wrongly, or listening to a word that is not spoken the way it is spelt, is often one of the largest issues for the non-English speaker.
When pondering the question of ‘how to improve my vocabulary’, consider simply listening. Although certainly not the most effective method of developing vocabulary, research has demonstrated that listening does build vocabulary – even when the learner hears only a small number of new words (Cohen, 2008).
Learners should not only participate in environments that are rich in vocabulary (even if just to listen), but they should also expose themselves to vocabulary software that offers audio pronunciations. One such product is Ultimate Vocabulary, a product that provides over fifty usage examples, word history, visual word explorer, encyclopaedia information, and images for every word. The Audio Pronunciation is actually human and not computerized.
Active participation in specific exercises also works on improving vocabulary. Some of these exercises involve studying opposite meanings (i.e. antonym); similar meanings (synonyms); and working on words that that are spelt the same but have different meanings (homophones) (California Department of Education, 2007). In terms of learning synonyms, Greever and Bachelor (1922, The Century Vocabulary Builder, p.178) suggest that the best technique is “proceeding from the known to the unknown”. It is also better to structure this learning. That is, they maintain that learning synonyms spontaneously by inference and unplanned circumstance can sometimes misinform.
When in the initial stages of vocabulary development, you might be left pondering ‘how to improve my vocabulary’. It might seem like a daunting task. There are, however, options at hand. Although listening is not considered to be the most effective of vocabulary-building methods, it certainly can be an invaluable tool when developing vocabulary.
References
Allen, J 2006, ‘Too Little of Too Much? What Do We Know about Making Vocabulary Instruction Meaningful?’, Voices From the Middle, vol. 13, no. 4. pp. 16-19.
California Department of Education 2007, Research Digest No. 7 – Evidence-based Reading Instruction.
Cohen, J 2008, Listening to Learn: Boosting Vocabulary with Interactive Activities, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan.
Greever, G & Bachelor, JM, 1922, The Century Vocabulary Builder, The Century Co., New York.
Pikulski, JJ and Templeton, S 2004, Teaching and Developing Vocabulary: Key to Long-Term Reading Success, Houghton Mifflin Company.