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This video is brought to you by EAPFoundation.com, the website for all your academic English needs
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This video will focus on features of vocabulary. These apply to any type of vocabulary, but we'll be focusing in particular on academic vocabulary
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A mistake many students make when studying vocabulary is they just translate into their own language, focusing on the meaning
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This is actually fine if all you want to do with the word is understand it when you read it
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But if you want to do more, for example, use it in your source. speaking or your writing, you need to understand much more about the word than just its meaning
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This video looks at nine features of vocabulary that you should be focusing on in order to really
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understand a word. I will also look at an example word to see what those nine features look like
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So the first thing, of course, that you should study with a new word is its meaning. This is going to be essential however you want to use it, whether just understand it in reading
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or listening or use it in your speaking or writing. Most words have more
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multiple meanings and when learning a new word it recommended to only focus on one meaning either the most common meaning or the meaning in the context in which you encountered it for example in a reading or listening text the word head for example has thirty two different meanings for the noun and nine different meanings for the verb The first meaning the upper part of the body is one you probably familiar with
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Meaning number four is a person who is in charge, for example, the head of the operation
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Meaning 17 is the foam at the top of a drink, for example, beer. Meaning 29, a toilet on a boat or a ship
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Those last two meanings are ones you're unlikely to need, especially in academic English
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and a tip for when using a dictionary, the lower the number, the more common than meaning
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So meaning one there is the most common meaning of the word head. So that's meaning which, of course, we need to study
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What else should we be looking at for new vocabulary? Well, the next feature is frequency
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English has a really large number of words. Some estimates put this at around a million words
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Now, it's not possible to study all of the words in English, so you need to be selective
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And an important question to ask is, is it a common word
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If it's not a common word, then don't study it. Words that you should focus on in particular are high-frequency words
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especially the most common 2,000 words in English, which cover around 90% of words in spoken and written texts
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And there are some good sources that can help you out here for example the general service list the GSL which is a list of the most common 2 words in English Many linguists actually think that high words means the most common 3 words in English which cover around 95 of words in written or spoken texts
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And a good source, if you want to study the most frequent 3,000 words in English, is the BNC-C-C-O-C-A lists
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There are links for all of these in the description. For academic English, we should also be focusing on common academic words
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The most well-known source for these is the academic word list, the A-W-L, which lists the most
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frequent words in academic English not contained in the G-SL. There are, however, other academic word lists which can be useful, for example, the academic
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vocabulary list or the AVL. Something else to focus on for academic English is technical words
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These are words which are actually low frequency in everyday English, but will be high-frequency
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in particular subject areas. For example, if you're studying biology, we have the words mitosis
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osmosis, cell membrane. In economics we have elasticity, externality, aggregate. So these are not generally common words
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but they are common in biology and economics. There are also word lists for studying technical words
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There the secondary school vocabulary lists or SVL and the middle school vocabulary lists or MSVL Again links for those are in the description The next thing we should think about is pronunciation
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And this is going to be important if we want to understand a word when we hear it
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and also if we want to use the word in our speaking. Pronunciation in English is especially difficult
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especially because of the large number of vowel sounds compared to other languages
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The difficulty of pronunciation can also be seen in words which are spelled similarly but which are pronounced very differently
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For example, these three words, which all contain the letters O-U-G-H, but which have very different vowel sounds and therefore different pronunciation
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Tough, though, and thought. Something else to consider and maybe make note of is the stress in words with more than one syllable
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For example, the word syllable has three syllables, and the stress is on the first one, syllable
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The next feature is spelling, and this of course is going to be very important if you want to use the word in our writing
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Spelling in English can also be very difficult because words are often not spelled the way they sound
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We can see this most clearly using homophones, which are words which sound the same but have different meaning and spelling
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For example, tough, which can be..
