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Ways to study and retain vocab
Steel Angel
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So I work as a tutor and have recently started working with a student who is very smart but gated on tests by her vocabulary. I'm not the first tutor she's worked with at my work place so we've already tried a few methods of improving it that haven't taken. So now I'm trying to find approaches I haven't thought of so that we can hopefully find something that sticks.
So those of you who have had to work on vocab, whether for English or a foreign language (or if English is a foreign language, etc.), and done something besides flash cards and using the words in your own sentences to make it stick, please let me know what worked for you so I can assemble a list of ideas.
So those of you who have had to work on vocab, whether for English or a foreign language (or if English is a foreign language, etc.), and done something besides flash cards and using the words in your own sentences to make it stick, please let me know what worked for you so I can assemble a list of ideas.
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Other than that, memorizing Greek/Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes works really well for expanding basic vocabulary.
I don't post around here trying to show off my broad vocabulary, but I actually am fairly good with it, and I owe my skill to reading.
But as for something you could actually do inside a tutoring session's time frame, the best I can offer is maybe give her some reading passages with difficult words in them so that she can see new words in context. It's a roundabout way of improving it but it might work. Best of luck.
reading books is really the best way to expand your vocabulary and ability to infer meaning (context, roots)
If they're studying for a specific test that's coming up in the near future their best short-term bet is to cram flash cards of commonly appearing vocab words.
I do the tutoring schtick as well, and I had a student who had serious issues retaining vocab. It wasn't until 3 months into tutoring that the parents decided to hand me a pamphlet about his inability to process abstraction and a general cognitive issue that meant he was provided with no deadlines for schoolwork.
Otherwise, yeah, reading is the ideal solution for this sort of situation. Knowing that my students aren't just going to head to the library and pick some classics, I usually start by asking them to read the front page of the newspaper (hopefully they can get it at school if their parents don't have a subscription). A lot of students have issues debating the real-world usage of certain "exotic" words, so I find journalism to be a safe defense against impracticality against that stance, even if it's not totally honest.
I also like to use micro-fiction, as attention spans are always an issue and being able to cover vocabulary within a fully defined story is really helpful.
I suggest you do this with relatively common or well known words to start with. Maybe get her to deconstruct the word utopia - or something along those lines. Philosophy is another good one.
Use this in combination with reading of good literature, and your student should see some improvement.
When I started reading in kindergarten I absolutely hated it, but my mother literally forced me to read for 30min every day, and after a while I stopped resisting and just started doing it, and then a hunger for literature was born into me and by 3rd grade I was reading Tolkien..
This is a very smart student outside of this one problem so this is doubtful from my experience. That or it's a ridiculously narrow issue.
Anyway, I guess I'll just focus more on the reading part if nothing else clicks. I've been concurrently having her sample short stories similar to works she has enjoyed to find an author that will click with her.
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1) Teach the vocab word by splitting into pieces and making a "story" about it that relates to the definition of the word. This may sound borderline kindergarten-er-ish but it worked for us 16 and 17 year olds. For example: magnanimous became "my nanny moose", and the story was that our teacher had a moose as a nanny who was so nice. My teacher would really ham up the story. [note: it's been 6 or 7 years and I still remember the damn story around that word, and I still remember the definition. So it worked for me]
2) Have people use the word in sentences when speaking with each other, have them write out a short story using some or all of the vocab words for the week. (usually ten at a time)
3) Give bonus points/extra credit if you are reading a book and happen to see a vocab word in use. I would write all these down on a little piece of paper as I read. Rather than giving "extra credit" since this is just tutoring, maybe you could work it out so a point total corresponded to some prize, like a candy bar or something.
Yeah, I only brought it up because if it weren't for this one issue my student was having I would've never thought to ask his parents.
Similar to Spacemilk's suggestions, tying the mental acquisition to the mechanical act of writing the word and its definition while saying it aloud can be useful. Sometimes my students are very hesitant and/or tortuously slow when given the slightest of creative endeavors (like writing a sentence using the word), so making it a simple "no wrong answer" set up of copying it out is fine. If they don't know how to spell a word it's more likely that they have trouble matching the visual representation of a word with its internalized meaning.
If the student's decent with languages you can follow a thread from saggio's idea and try to build associations based on a word's similarity (e.g. la macchina sounds like machine; a car is a machine; macchina = car).
Otherwise I'll have to ...sixteenth 'reading'. I never retained vocabulary from flash cards, but if I saw the word in a sentence (particularly if it's a unique word in a sentence of fairly normal words) I'd be more apt to remember it.
I could muster exactly zero interest in even starting to learn the meaning of these outlandish useless words and the only words I knew were the ones I had actually used or read before. Everything else fell in the 'bullshit' category and I could not get them in my head no matter what. These words were so outlandish and useless that I could not even think of sentences in which I could use them, where a synonym would not fit better or make more sense.
Even now - after 4 years of academia and reading and writing about human geography/sociology/heritage management/architecture - I have not found a single use for most of the words I had to learn in high school. I asked my teachers what use these odd words had and why we had to know them by heart and the only reply I would get was 'shut up and learn'.
If your student's school is anything like mine my only advice to her is to give up wasting hours upon hours doing something utterly useless and instead focus on things that are actually useful: pronunciation and grammar are usually the difficult parts of a language.
If you think you will not offend, ask her to consume Mangos, and also to carry with her a small notebook with a list of at least 10 words to memorize, that way shen use the time available during commuting or just at the waiting room of her dentist to read this notebook till she can repeat the words by memory.
After learning the first 10 words, she may then add 10 more and repeat the process.