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Why didn't I think of that? (student FAQs answered)
4 years agoHello everyone! 😄🌞
In this discussion post series, I answer the questions I get asked by students most often.
Student Question
I see a word and I know it, but I can't bring it to mind myself. What should I do?
My Answer
That's a great question and something almost every student wants an answer to. What you're really asking, here, is how to move words from your passive vocabulary to your active vocabulary.
Here are 3 massively easy ways to do just that... so you can activate your vocabulary starting right now:
Read aloud Why not just read silently, like we normally do? Well, you could do that, but reading aloud doubles your efforts: you're getting word info from your eyes AND from your ears. So words enter your vocabulary through 2 doors, so to speak, creating 2 pathways to each word (kind of like having multiple pathways to a file on your laptop).
Read a variety of things It's easy to read things we love: romance novels, daily newspapers, your favourite blogger. The problem is this: certain words are only likely to appear in certain places. How many romance novels, for example, are likely to have the word 'chainsaw'? Expand your reading repertoire to include all kinds of reading: manuals, recipes, novels, biographies, non-fiction, history, comics, and so on.
Write things down Writing is another pathway to get words (and ideas and everything else) into your vocabulary. Write lists, daily agendas, journals and more in English. Even sitting down to a dictionary and copying its words onto paper helps (a lot, apparently), but we can come up with way more fun things than that: recipes, memos, quotes, comments, and so on.
Do you want to activate your vocabulary? I can help you with that! 😄🌞❤
Dixie
