Vocabulary Study

I want to address this post to a great weakness among most of the students I have come across in my years at Bilkent, vocabulary. This is quite normal as the amount of vocabulary that students need to succeed in an academic environment is quite large. Learning of this nature requires a disciplined approach that a students can follow through with. First, the most natural way of buidling and reinforcing vocabulary is reading. This means finding books and articles that the students enjoys and wants to read. In the course of this, students will reinforce learning of words they already know and pick-up some new words that they don't. If you as a student want to improve your vocabulary, go find something enjoyable to read in English. With the Internet, you can find something on anything, so you have no excuse. As you may have heard, Google will probably in the near future be able to give you access to any book found in a library through its massive book scanning project. Second, the internet has lots of resources for learning vocabulary, such as this website about the 1000 most common words in English, http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm . Familiarizing yourself and using them on a regular basis can add some variety to your vocab study. Thirdly, along those lines, I want to draw your attention to the Academic Word List, http://www.academicvocabularyexercises.com/ .This list is a compilation of the most frequently used words in academic English, so learning these goes a long way when it comes to covering your academic vocabulary needs.
No one way of learning works for everyone. Each of you need to find what works for you and work it. This generally include reading and some daily focused study such as with vocabulary exercises, vocabualry journal work, flash cards and so forth. I will address the issue of creating and using a vocabulary journal in the next post next week. In the meantime, feel free to sign up for this blog so I can get the next post out to you.