VOCABULARY LEVEL 3 – Package 1 – Introduction and what is vocabulary
Learning Outcomes
By the end of VOCABULARY LEVEL 3 you should be able to
✔ study vocabulary independently
✔ use different strategies to expand and record vocabulary
Introduction to Independent Learning
Independent learning gives you more choice about what, when and how fast to study. It also prepares you to learn after university.
In order to study independently you need to be able to set your own aims, choose how you want to study and reflect on the usefulness of studying that you do and on your overall progress.
Since you have chosen to study VOCABULARY LEVEL 3, we can assume that you want to learn more about how to expand and remember words more effectively. This course provides you with some example activities for studying these skills. For most of these exercises, we have suggested an aim. We hope this can guide you in choosing aims for yourself later.
Try these activities and then reflect on their effectiveness in helping you to develop and improve your reading skills. If they are helpful, do some similar exercises later. If they are not successful, you may try different exercises.
Introduction
Learning vocabulary is an essential part of learning a language. The more words you know, the more you will be able to understand what you hear and read and the better you will be able to express yourself when speaking or writing. Besides coping with the vast number and rich variety of words in the English language, the main problems for students are deciding which words to learn and how to recall them.
In this package, we shall look at vocabulary recording strategies which will:
help you to decide which academic words to record (and which not to)
show you how to record new and existing academic vocabulary
expand your academic vocabulary to a more advanced and sophisticated level
After all, according to Bergen Evans,
“many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one's vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.”
But as Bergen was an American lexicographer, a Rhodes Scholar, a Harvard graduate and a Northwestern University> professor of English, this statement is probably not very surprising.
Activity 1
Activity 2
Rating Form
Package 1 – Introduction and what is vocabulary?
Activity 1
The first thing that we are going to do is to explore what we already know about English vocabulary. Answer the questions by clicking on the suggested choices.
1. How many words are there in the English language?
2. How many words does the average native speaker know?
3. What percentage of these words does the average speaker use in everyday speech?
4. Imagine that this is graph which represents all of the English vocabulary that you know.
Click on the percentage bar of words that you use on a regular day-to-day basis.
100%
%
50%
0%
Once you have finished, click on the Check button below and your results will be displayed.
Answer:
The ultimate aims of the vocabulary tasks throughout this part of the online learning course are:
to activate more of your existing receptive / passive vocabulary
to expand your overall vocabulary bank
1. How many words are there in the English language?
a) 70,000 b) 170,000 c) 250,000 d) 1 million+
There is no single sensible answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it is so hard to decide what counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (dogs plural noun, dogs present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since we might also find hot-dog or even hotdog?
It is also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?
The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).
This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.
2. How many words does the average native speaker know?
a) 12,000 b) 15,000 c) 18,000 d) 20,000
This depends on the individual but the average well educated thirty year old should have a total vocabulary of 16,000 to 18,000. Shakespeare by contrast had a vocabulary of around 30,000 words although he had an advantage as he made up many of them.
3. What percentage of these words does the average speaker use in everyday speech?
a) 10% b) 30% c) 50% d) 60% e) 70%
The average speaker uses about 10% of their total vocabulary actively in day-to-day situations.
4. Imagine that this is graph which represents all of the English vocabulary that you know.
What is vocabulary?
When you first encounter a new word, there are often other things that you need to think about besides the definition. This diagram highlights some of the key factors which affect our understanding of a word.
Activity 2
Read these sentences, look at the underlined words. Try to guess the meaning of the words you do not know and then decide which factor or factors in the diagram might affect your understanding of them. Then click on the word and you will be given an explanation.
I’m bloody pleased to meet you Mr. Leung.
She
expired
at 2:30 am.
She
passed away
at 2.30 am.
She
died at 2.30 am.
She
kicked the bucket
at 2.30 am.
G’day cobber. Like a tinny?
Click
on the
mouse and an
icon will pop up at the end of the
toolbar.
Mother Teresa was notorious for her work among the poor in India.
It was a
swell
party. Everyone was so
gay
.
Okay, this is a three hour class so we’ll have an intermission at 4:30.
Please be informed that all reports are to be submitted by Friday.
Could you let me have your report by Friday?
Wow! Like cool man. Awesome!
He’s a lovely little boy – he has such an innocent, pure and childish quality about him.
