Out of sight, out of mind? Vocab learning Strategies

I am sure everyone knows the dreadful days before vocabulary tests, when we try to memorise lists of words and their translations, but every time we repeat them it feels like we have never heard these words before. If our brain is made for learning, why is it so time-consuming to remember new vocabulary? The main reason for this is that our brain only remembers what it finds important. Whatever happens more than once or appears in a specific context is more likely to be remembered. We can use these strategies to our advantage when it comes to learning vocabulary.

This year, we are using a book from David Porter to become familiar with vocabulary typically used in academic writing. The main advantage of this book is that it collects a great deal of useful vocabulary on just a few pages. Instead of providing a list of words without context, the book consists of different types of exercises. They show you how the new words are used in a context and sometimes the exercises even provide you with synoyms or collocations that can later be studied as one chunk.

However, it is important not to be fooled by the feeling of accomplishment you get once you have completed the exercises. Filling out the exercises was just the first part of a long remembering process. The main disadvantage of using the Porter book could be that you neglect certain words or phrases because they seemed clear in that specific exercise, even though you would not recognise them in another context. There is a big difference between deducing the meaning of a word from its context and truly knowing a word. Knowing a word also includes knowledge about the correct pronunciation, possible collocations and the correct use in different contexts - often a word can have more than one meaning and can therefore occur in different contexts. The lack of information about other possible meanings of a word is another disadvantage of working only with the Porter book.

For whoever wants to know new words, the Porter book can provide a useful starting point, but it is definitely not enough to work with the book alone. I personally enjoy studying anything clearly structured, so I found last year's glossary very helpful. That is why I decided to create my own glossary again this year. Typing the words into a spreadsheet is the first step of my learning process because I need to pay attention to their spelling. However, this year's glossary will need to be an improved and more extensive version compared to last year's. Studying just a collection of words with their respective definitions and example sentences will not be enough to get me through this semester anymore.

Since we will have an oral exam at the end of the semester, we will have to know how to pronounce the new words correctly. For this reason I look up every word in at least two different monolingual dictionaries, e.g. the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary or MacMillan, and listen to their pronunciation. Whenever the pronunciation differs from what I thought, I add the phonetic transcription to my glossary or underline the stressed syllable.

I also try to add synoyms or antonyms of the new words. Sometimes they can be found in the Porter book exercises. Unfortunately, a list will all the synonyms and antonyms would be too long to study successfully in a short time and we also have to consider that most "synonyms" are actually only near synonyms. So for now, I only see them as a possibility to give me a better idea of the meaning of a word.

This year we also talked about corpora. They are useful for finding collocations and example sentences. I like "Just the Word" because it is simple to use, but unfortunately it does not contain all of the academic writing words and the site crashes often. Another site I use to find collocations is GLOWBE, the Corpus of Global Web Based English. This corpus allows you to search for specific types of collocations, e.g. only nouns, and it lets you compare different varieties of English. Sometimes, certain collocations are more common or have a unique meaning in one variety. Since we have to aim for one variety of English, this corpus can help us sound more natural by using typical collocations for our chosen standard, while remaining congnisant of other standards.

Once I have more or less finished my glossary, the actual study process begins. I am a fan of the flashcard system that makes you repeat words that you haven't remembered on a regular basis, but I prefer collecting my words on a digital spreadsheet rather than on paper cards. However, instead of using a programme for creating online flashcards, I am trying to find a way to incorporate the idea of flashcards into my Google Docs glossary.

When I am studying, i can hide certain colums of my spreadsheet, for example the pronunciation or the example sentences in order to test myself and see whether I would be able to pronounce the word correctly or come up with an appropriate sentence including the word. Whenever I have problems with a word, I highlight that row in red. The next time I study, I look specifically at the rows in red. If I know the solution this time, I highlight the row in yellow, and the third time I give a correct answer I highlight it in green. Naturally, after a while I also repeat the words in not highlighted columns. Ideally, eventually none of the rows will be highlighted anymore.

I hope I could give you some ideas on how to study a great deal of vocabulary effectively. Most importantly, however, is to use what you have learned in as many situations as possible. This is obviously more difficult with vocabulary for academic writing, but we will have the chance to prove what we have learned in our academic paper later this semester.