When I was little, I started picking up Chinese words (in characters) little by little, through learning with teachers, friends, and family. Very soon I was able to read easy books and newspapers. Of course I still had many words that I didn’t learn, but I was able to figure out the meaning of the passages by guessing. Amazingly most of time I could guess correctly. As I read more, my Chinese vocabulary increased incredibly fast.
When I started my college life, majoring in English, I struggled with reading English books. Our classes were assigned to read several English books in the Ladder Series books. At that point, I did not have enough vocabulary to process the reading easily. I basically would encounter about 15-20 new words on each page. My strategy was to set aside time to look up an English Chinese dictionary and jotted down words for my reference. Unfortunately after the time and effort I put in, I still had much trouble understanding the content in the book. I reasoned that most words I looked up carried more varied definitions and I would need more training to process the information adequately. I was not able to appreciate reading English books until later on I developed better grasp of vocabulary.
I realize that vocabulary power is crucial for better jobs and better future. Lawyers and physicians tend to have more vocabulary words than other professions. For average people, they probably can communicate well enough with about 2000 words. However, to generate higher level of meaning and more precise terms for deals and decisions, we need to build much richer vocabulary.
The best way to build vocabulary is through grasping meaning out of context. In an article “Taking delight in words” by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan, the authors introduced the text talk approach to teach children new vocabulary words. It highlights the following:
- Contextualize the word for its role in the story.
- Create a phonological representation of the word by asking children to repeat the word.
- Use a student-friendly definition to explain the meaning of the word .
- Provide extra examples in contexts.
- Have children interact with examples of the word’s use or provide their own.
- Use phonological representation to reinforce the learning of new words.
In reality, I found it very beneficial to use cloze passages, where you may leave out every few words (as blanks) in reading passages. This requires readers to use the context clues to figure the passages. It gives meaning to both vocabulary words and passages. I had used it on many occasions to learn to read and memorize the reading passages and found them very effective.
