Page 7 - Active Skills for Reading Intro Book

Vocabulary Learning Tips

Learning new vocabulary is an important part of learning to be a good reader. Remember that the letter C in
ACTIVE Skills for Reading reminds us to cultivate vocabulary.

1 Decide if the word is worth learnin now

As you read you will find many words you do not know. You will slow your reading fluency if you stop at
every new word. For example, you should stop to find out the meaning of a new word if:
a. you read the same word many times.
b. the word appears in the heading of a passage, or in the topic sentence of a paragraph-the sentence
that gives the main idea of the paragraph.
2 Record information about new words you decide to lear

Keep a vocabulary notebook in which you write words you want to remember. Complete the following
information for words that you think are important to learn:

0 New word collect
i&•
0 Translation verb
Part of speech
0 Sentence where found Jamie Oliver collected more than 2 70,000 signatures from people.

0 My own sentence My brother collects stamps.

3 Learn word from the same family

For many important words in English that you will want to learn, the word is part of a word family. As you learn
new words, learn words in the family from other parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs., etc.).

0 Noun happiness

0 Verb hapPY
Adjective
0 Adverb happily

4 Learn word that go with the key word you are learnin .

When we learn new words, it is important to learn what other words are frequently used with them. These
are called collocations. Here is an example from a student's notebook.

0 take two-week next week
long

go on a short vacation in Italy
need summer with my family
have school l,ymyself

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