9/6/2023 0 Comments Vocabulary teacher guide![]() So can we say the following? I’m going to bed to doze off. It looks like it means to fall asleep: Pete dozed off on the train. (If something is subtle, it is difficult to understand 100% because the meaning is not obvious.) It is important to keep encountering new words Synonyms for very big include huge, massive, enormous and giant. This way, you can improve your English vocabulary without even learning new words!įor example, instead of saying something is very big, take a moment to think of a better word from your passive vocabulary list. There is an important tip here - one way to improve your vocabulary is to move more words from your passive vocabulary to your active vocabulary. If he looked it up in the dictionary he’d see the definition as “ not existing or occurring at the same time”.īut he never uses this word himself, and he might say “happening at the same time” because he can’t remember the word “asynchronous”. He knows that it means something like “not at the same time”. ![]() It is absolutely normal that your active vocabulary is much smaller than your passive vocabulary.įor example, George, a native speaker, recognises the word ‘asynchronous’. Then, we have a bank of words that we can use in our speech or writing. We have a bank of words that we know and that we recognise when we see them. If you experience this, don’t panic! It’s perfectly normal. I often have conversations with my students like this: Student: Teacher, what is another word for ‘excellent’? Me: How about… fantastic? Student: Of course! Actually, I already knew that word. Active and passive vocabulary: the words you use vs. Remember, when words are used in combination with other words, the meaning can be completely different from the component words. However, even though they know the word “wore” and the word “off”, they often do not know the meaning of the phrasal verb “wore off”. I found that many of my students would look at a sentence like this and say that there is no new vocabulary here - they know all the words. What about this sentence? Can we learn any new vocabulary from it? The effect of the medicine slowly wore off and my headache returned. Remember that matching words together is an important concept in English. Instead of thinking of ‘partial’ as a new word, you should think of ‘ a partial success’ as a new building block in your vocabulary.Ī quick Google search will show that it is a common phrase that people use. However, it is more important to see how it is used. It’s quite simple to guess the meaning: not quite 100%. ![]() Her goal was to lose 30 kilograms, but she only lost 20. To achieve this, we can learn ‘chunks’ of vocabulary.įor example, you might read the following: Joanne’s diet was a partial success. It is fine to learn new words, but it is even more important to see how words go together. If we have these, we can build a more beautiful building!Īnd sometimes, we can’t find the block that we’re looking for, and our building has a hole in it! A building block is not always a word Some blocks are more beautiful than others. If we think of vocabulary as the building blocks of a language, the more blocks you have, the more you can build. We can think of vocabulary as building blocks But I’m also a language learner, so I can understand the process from the learner’s point of view.ĭrawing on this experience, I have some practical tips and innovative strategies to share with you. At intermediate or upper-intermediate level, your goal should be to widen your vocabulary in order to help you express yourself better.Īs an English teacher, I have helped many students with this process. ![]() You need to learn around 1000 words to reach a basic conversational level. When you begin learning a language, it is a struggle to understand even simple dialogues.
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