How to improve your vocabulary?
August 11th, 2012 in Vocabulary
To score well on the IELTS test, you must have a large, active vocabulary. So how can you improve your vocabulary? Here are a few tips.
Give yourself time
Learning new words requires a great deal of time. So be patient and don’t expect quick results. Try to learn 5 to 10 words a day. If you try to learn a large number of words all at once, you are unlikely to remember any of them ten-fifteen minutes later.
Read and listen
Read as much as you can. Do you know? The best writers are people who read a lot. And who are the best speakers? Well, they are people who listen a lot.
Choose the right materials for reading
While choosing materials for reading just make sure that you have got the right books / magazines. If you are keen on improving your academic vocabulary, you have to read magazines, journals and other publications educational in nature. They will expose you to huge amounts of useful vocabulary. The advantage of this method is that learning words used in context is easy. So you will be able to learn a large number of words in a short period of time. There is yet another benefit. When you read English books and listen to English lectures, you will automatically pick up a lot of collocations. These are word combinations that always go together. Learning collocations is far better than learning individual words.
The books and magazines you select for reading should be interesting to you. When we find something interesting, our brain tends to concentrate. So learning becomes a whole lot of easier. If the text is boring you will have a tough time keeping your attention focused on it.