Having a large, diverse, comprehensive English vocabulary will help you succeed at work and at school. Your daily interactions with other people will flow more smoothly, and you’ll be able to get the most out of the information available to you in books and on the internet. The benefits of an improved vocabulary start at a very young age: studies have shown that children who are exposed to books and other reading materials on a regular basis outside of school are able to correctly use twice as many words as children who spend little to no time reading, or being read to by others.1 In general, the average child learns about eight words per day during the first four years of school.2 However, if a child starts school with little experience in reading or writing, they are more than three times more likely to drop out of school before graduating.3
Reading skills include both vocabulary knowledge and reading ability. If you’re not able to read quickly, it obviously slows down the speed at which you acquire knowledge, but also can actually affect your ability to understand what you’re reading. Again, this is an issue for both children and adults. Studies have shown that nearly one-fifth of children between the ages of 9 and 11 can only read at approximately 75 words per minute,4 and that this slow pace means that it’s harder for them to keep ideas and concepts connected – they may forget what they read at the beginning of a page by the time they reach the end of it!
One of the things that helps improve reading speed is having a large vocabulary. If you don’t know a word, you have to stop and look it up, or skip over it and hope that you can figure out its meaning by context (or guessing). It has been estimated that just 15 minutes per day of voluntary reading – outside of school or work – will expose you to more than a million words per year5, and the more words you see, the more you’ll be familiar with.
It’s important to have excellent reading and comprehension skills to succeed in the workplace. A survey done in 20076 found that 75% of the employers polled rated good reading comprehension as “very important” when looking at potential employees, and that workers with such skills earned at least three times more income. Another study concluded that by 2020, the average worker will need to have a much greater ability to read and write well in order to fully participate in, and benefit from, our increasingly information- and technology-focused society.7
1 Beck, I.L., & McKeown M.G. (1991). Conditions of vocabulary acquisition. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P.D.
2 Baumann, J.F. Kame’enui, E.J., Ash, G.E. (2003). Research on vocabulary instruction: Voltaire Redux. In J. Flood, D. Lapp,
3 National Adult Literacy Survey, (2002) NCES, U.S. Department of Education
4 Fountas, Irene, and G.S. Pinnell. Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational, 1991.
5 Anderson, R. C., P. T. Wilson, and L. G. Fielding. “Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside school.” Reading Research Quarterly, 23, (1988): 285–303.
6 National Endowment for the Arts, Research Report #47, “To Read or Not to Read”
7 National Council on Teachers of English Standards for the English Language Arts
