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Improving your vocabulary should be a priority for any IELTS candidate. The question is how to achieve
this. Here are 10 of my top tips and, to make this really practical I give you some online resources or
exercises for each tip. The tips get more practical and less general as you go down the list.
2. Be passive
This one may sound strange normally teachers encourage you to be as active as possible. Heres the
thing. You learn words by using them and using words can include reading, writing, speaking and
listening. By focussing on the passive skills (reading and listening), you expose yourself to huge
amounts of vocabulary far more than 5 words a day. More importantly, you will be learning how the
words work what other words they go with and the different forms of the words. What do i mean by
being passive? Just read and listen in English lots and lots.
This passive approach does take time but it does also work. Ask most any teacher and they will tell you
that the best writers are people who read most and the best speakers are those who listen best.
The resources I suggest here are:
BBC Words in the News: excellent variety of topics with vocabulary help and a listening option
The Economist: contains exactly the sort of texts found in IELTS
TED: a superb site with videos on a very wide range of topics with the bonus of subtitles
Or just read and listen about what you find interesting. If you are interested, your brain will start working. If
your brain starts working, you are much more likely to process the vocabulary you hear/read. Within
reason it doesnt matter what you read as you will still be exposed to lots of general vocabulary. This can
work. I taught myself Romanian by reading about sport in the Romanian newspapers.
3. Be active
Passive is good but so is active. Being active accelerates the learning process. If you spend some time
focussing on vocabulary actively, you start to notice more about other words when you are just reading
and listening. This concept of noticing is very trendy among language teachers for now. Being active
means setting aside some time each day to specific vocabulary learning.
My resource here may sound strange: its a dictionary! No one reads dictionaries, right? Well, but you can.
Online dictionaries are far more user-friendly than their book cousins.
Macmillan Dictionary : to see why I recommend this dictionary, you might care to check out this video
tutorial.
Macmillan dictionary from Dominic Cole on Vimeo.
4. Learn to spell
Oh dear, spelling. Spelling does matter in IELTS. Strange as it may sound, it matters most in the listening
paper where it can negatively affect your score by up to 2 bands. There is of course no magic bullet
where spelling is concerned but there are definite skills that can help you learn to spell.
One key can be to treat spelling as a looking exercise not a listening exercise. Part of the problem with
English spelling is that what we say and what we write are often two quite different things. The idea is to
look at the word, say it, close your eyes, see it with your eyes closed, test yourself. The process takes a
little time but it works. What you will discover is that, after some practice, you get into the routine of just
seeing words without having to learn their spelling.
The resources I recommend here are:
Look Cover: a superb site that I have used very successfully with students who have had serious spelling
difficulties
BBC Skillswise: another excellent BBC site that works on the same principle
The Really Boring English Blog: not sure about including this one as it is one of my sites, but it does contain
different ideas for teachers to make learning spelling more fun and, perhaps, more effective.
all academics use. Indeed, most learners are surprised when they look at the list at how simple most of
the words are. Simple can be good.
My suggested resources here are:
Academic Vocabulary from The University of Nottingham: a seriously excellent site. For learners, perhaps
the most interesting feature is the AWL highlighter and gapmaker. You can read a text and see which the important
words are.
AWL exercises: this is a selection of point and click exercises on the AWL: typically, these types of exercise
are much more stimulating on a computer than in a book.
A particularly interesting exercise for IELTS candidates here is to copy/paste one of their own essays into
the AWL highlighter. I would suggest that you should be using around 10 academic words per essay. If
you are not, you are probably using the wrong sort of language. For more on this check out my post:
IELTS writing key essay vocabulary 8 exercises from the AWL
7. Dont just write down one word think collocations and phrases
If I had only one vocabulary learning tip, this would be it. The point here is that we dont use words, we
use groups of words what some language teachers call chunks. And, more to the point, typically most
words are used in fairly standard word combinations or collocations. So, as a learner what you need to
do is learn those combinations and my suggestion is that when you write the word down, you write down
those combinations.
Heres an example:
analyse
Scientists
analyse
analyse
analyse
analyse
Further
analyse
collect and
analyse
record and
analyse
Or just to repeat the word with a rising intonation. Another possibility that is particularly useful for IELTS
candidates is to:
10. Dont just learn new words learn old words better
Often the best language is relatively simple language. Something I know IELTS-Simon would agree with
me on (see for example his post on using moreover ). There is a positive danger in trying to learn
complex language that native speakers dont use that often themselves. More than that, very often
mistakes are made with already learned vocabulary. In practical terms this can mean you should:
review the words you are learning on a weekly basis
with your teacher make a checklist of the words that you use incorrectly
Boring I know but effective.