Most international students are concerned about the size of their English vocabulary. This is clearly an important factor in both writing and reading. But the following points are worth considering:
- New words that you meet will be either specialist vocabulary or general academic vocabulary. For example, if you are a medical student there are words such as 'vaccination' which belong to your discipline and which you soon learn. But there are also many words used in most academic texts e.g. 'evolutionary' that you will need to use. This general vocabulary may be harder to master.
- Everybody has two sets of vocabulary; active and passive. Passive vocabulary are words that you recognise but do not use in speech or writing, while the active vocabulary, which is smaller, are words that you can use more fluently in your written or spoken language. As time goes by, words can move from the passive to the active store.
- Do not try to learn all the new words that you meet. Many will be unimportant. If the same word recurs frequently, then it is worth memorising.
- Pay special attention to verbs.They can play a critical role in your understanding of a sentence. It can be useful to keep a record of new verbs in order to make your writing more effective.
- Studying suffixes and prefixes will help you understand much new academic vocabulary. A good example are the suffixes -phile and -phobe. An Anglophile is someone who loves England, while the opposite is an Anglophobe!
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