Improving vocabulary starts by understand how recall exertions, shows Scott Thornbury
“I’m not 100% convinced that memorising the dictionary is the best way of improving your idiom, ” says the character played by Hugh Grant in Woody Allen’s film Small Time Crooks. Yet why not? If you could memorise the dictionary – or even the 5,000 most frequent paroles in that dictionary – wouldn’t that give you a huge advantage? Researchers estimate that a core dictionary of between 2,000 and 3,000 high-frequency oaths is probably enough to push learners over the intermediate plateau. So why don’t we insist on them memorising these messages, from day one, and as speedily as possible?
As an example, a New Zealand friend of mine who studied Maori asked me recently what I, as a language teacher, would clear of his teacher’s method: “We simply do bulks of words around a theme, for example, genealogy or meat. We have to learn these texts before the next assignment, then we come back and have a conversation about pedigree or meat etc, abusing these words. The schoolteacher feeds in the grammar that we need to stick the words together.” He added that he envisaged the method manipulated a treat.
Read more: theguardian.com
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