Ideas on vocabulary learning techniques

Copious vocabulary is very important if you want to score high in IELTS. But learning a large amount of new words can be a tough task, especially if you are busy with work, family, and other responsibilities.

In this chapter, we will give you some great tips on how to memorize large amounts of new vocabulary and phrases in a short span of time both based on our teaching and personal experience and on what we have found on the Internet.

• First of all you need to read a lot. Reading helps you see the words you already know in a new context and learn some new lexical units.

I recommend reading everything you can find in English – articles on the Internet, menus, newspapers, books, advertisements, etc.

You can even try to Google search in English. That will be a great way to enrich your vocabulary.

• Another great tip is to get in the habit of looking up words you don’t know.

A good example: you are watching a new TED video and hear new words that you seem to understand from the context, but you are not sure what exactly they mean.

Take your time to look them up. After that write those words in a notebook with their translations or definitions so that they be there every time you want to revise them.

But here you might ask – how do I work with those new words written in my notebook? Well, that’s a good question.

Actually there are a lot of learning methods:

1. making up as many associations with the word as possible,
2. saying the words many times,
3. using the words in your speaking or writing,
4. grouping them according to different principles,
5. asking someone to test you, etc.

You are free to use any method that works best for you.

• One more good recommendation is to focus on phrases while working on your vocabulary.

It means memorizing words in lexical chunks or even short sentences. In this way you will always have a set of expressions ready to use in a conversation.

For example, ‘Have a safe trip’, ‘Enjoy your meal’, ‘I am so happy to see you again’, etc.

So, instead of forming a sentence from scratch and trying to remember the words separately, you will have a set of speech patterns which you can use immediately.

• The last but not least advice is to review often.

When preparing for IELTS test, many students follow a special ritual of reviewing new vocabulary every morning and every evening before going to bed.

In this case yesterday’s vocabulary is more important than today’s. The aim is to transfer the short- term knowledge of new vocabulary into your long-term memory.

For this reason a review is extremely important, especially in the first few weeks after learning new vocabulary.

So those were some useful tips on how to remember new words based on our experience.

In addition to them, we will also tell you some great tricks that we have found on the web. Here is a list of those tricks according to their popularity and effectiveness.

Useful tips on how to remember the new English words

Firstly: put the words in places where you’ll see them as often as possible.

Yes, it is a common advice which we’ve never tried for some reason – put a sticker with names of objects on a wall, in a notebook you carry around, on your computer desktop, etc.

Second: learning vocabulary through audio materials.

Another “lazy” way to learn passively.

You can listen to podcasts or radio stations while working around the house or doing sports and automatically memorize new words with their meanings derived from the context.

Good results with no extra time spent.

Thirdly: describe the world around you regularly in the language you are learning.

How about that? Just push yourself to think in English every time you have time -driving a car, waiting in a line, going to work, etc.

You could start from simple descriptions of things surrounding you and gradually go to more complicated self-talks. Just don’t talk to yourself out loud!

Fourth: Use different applications and extensions for your browser.

There are a lot of them. I am not an active user of apps for learning a language, but many people consider them to be very useful.

So it’s up to you to try and decide whether this approach works for you.

That’s all we have for you in terms of learning techniques. I hope you find these recommendations and tips helpful in your preparation for the IELTS writing section II or speaking part of the exam.

Have fun learning new words and using them in your everyday conversations!