Vocabulary Teaching Strategy
Learn Vocabulary with Ease

by Alan Pritt

Building your vocabulary can be difficult, but with a good vocabulary teaching strategy it is much easier. The problem with a lot of information on improving memory is that while you can remember a shopping list, more abstract things are still difficult to memorise. Learning vocabulary is one of those more difficult things, so I’m going to give you a strategy for making that easier.

It is important to understand that vocabulary cannot really be understood properly using a dictionary definition. Dictionaries are good, but words evolve from being used in different situations and contexts. So before you really understand a new word, you’re going to have to read, hear, write and speak it in a variety of contexts.

That part, however, will happen naturally as you begin to use the words more and more. Our major concern here, then, is to plant that original seed of a memory.

To do this we need to do two things. First we need to make sure we have properly perceived the word, and then we need to connect it with something we already know.

Perceiving the word

When we encounter a new word, it is very easy to just glaze over it – not seeing it properly. Especially if a word is similar to something else we have seen, we will often make assumptions about the spelling which aren’t actually true. Therefore we need to make sure that what we think we see is, in fact, accurate.

With vocabulary we need to do this in two ways: phonetically and visually.

The process is quite simple: we take in the word from the page, we repeat it without looking at the page, and then we check what we have repeated.

For the visual part...

- look at the spelling
- close your eyes
- visualise each letter
- say the spelling out loud
- spell it backwards. (Saying it backwards confirms that you have learnt it visually and not just phonetically.)
- Finally test yourself to make sure you have it correct.

For the phonetic part...

- look away from the word
- say the word (You may find it helpful to imagine the visualisation of the word as you are doing this).
- then check that you have said it correctly.

If you can do that, then you know the word really well.

Committing it to memory

Now that you know the word, the next task is to connect that word to what you already know. To do this we need to turn the word into a memorable image in your imagination.

This will be best explained with an example. Imagine you are trying to learn the German word 'sogar' (an adverb meaning 'even')

Consider what the new word reminds you of that can be easily visualised. Try to pick the first thing that comes into your head because when you re-encounter the word you're likely to think the same way again.

So the first thing that comes to my mind when I see the word 'sogar' is sugar. As a word, it looks practically the same. This is great. It's easy to visualise a pile of sugar. So the first connection has been made:

sogar – sugar –

Now we need to connect it to the translation - 'even'. To do this I simply imagine pouring the sugar onto a pair of scales in even amounts. Thus:

sogar – sugar –

Visualise this vividly enough and you should find it easy to remember.

It's a simple concept but it may take a while to master. Other vocabulary is going to be more difficult to translate into an image than this word. But it can be done with any word. The more you practice, the more you'll improve, and the easier it will get.

Once you have memorised a word, you still don't really know it. To really understand the word you will have to use it in context in everyday language. Fortunately this is a natural process of using the language, and not something you should train specifically. As you discover the word again and again it will gradually become ingrained in your memory.

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