Yesterday we talked about the fact that expanding your reading materials will present you with an expanded list of English words that you can make part of your working vocabulary. However, just seeing a word in print doesn’t mean that you’ll instantly learn it; in general, it takes about twenty occurrences before a word is firmly in your mind. One way to increase the chance that you’ll learn a word the first time is to focus on it and try to figure out its definition and pronunciation, rather than skipping over it. When you see a new word, concentrate on three things:

How is it pronounced? Sound out the word using the pronunciation you think it has due to its spelling, or similarities to other words you already know. Say the word out loud when you do this. Sometimes the sound of a word will trigger associations in your mind that will lead you to the word’s meaning.

How is it formed? Can you identify a prefix, or a suffix, or a word root that looks familiar? Remember that most English words are made up of pieces of other, older words, and if you know what those pieces mean individually, you can combine them to get closer to the meaning of the word as a whole.

How is it used? Look at the word in the context of the sentence and paragraph. What clues are there in the text that might give you an idea of what the word means? If you believe you know what the word means, think of a synonym for the word and put that in the sentence instead. Does the phrase still make sense?

At the end of these three steps, you should have enough information to make an educated guess as to the true definition of the word. At this point, it’s a good idea to look the word up to be absolutely sure that you’re correct. To reinforce your memory, use some of the study tools we’ve talked about before, such as writing it out several times to practice the spelling and put the word in muscle memory, or creating two or three sample sentences using the word in context.

You’ll definitely want to look up the word if you don’t have any idea what it means. Lack of knowledge about one word might change the way you read an entire paragraph, and lead to misunderstanding in the future. However, if you don’t have access to a dictionary and if you believe you’ve gotten the sense of the text at that point, it’s all right to keep reading – but you might want to make a note of the word to look it up later, just to be certain.

Reference: Kuhn, M.R and Stahl, A.A. Teaching children to learn word meanings from context: A synthesis and some questions. Journal of Literacy Research, 30, 119-138 (1998)