Five Principles for Learning Vocabulary

Lecture 1

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ne reason to spend time and effort improving your vocabulary is that
words have the power to change how you see the world. Further,
our ability to use vocabulary effectively is one of the primary means
by which we communicate and connect with important people in our lives.
Choosing just the right word adds precision and clarity to our speech and
writing. Words are the tools we use to inform, advise, persuade, and reason.
But to start expanding your vocabulary, you need a structured approach—and
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harnessing the power of the English language.

The Dimmer-Switch Phenomenon
z Learning words is not an all-or-nothing affair, as though one
moment, you’ve never heard of a word and then, immediately after
looking it up in the dictionary, you become an expert user of that
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z A better metaphor that vocabulary researchers use is the dimmer

switch, which gradually increases the amount of light in a room.

Vocabulary learning works in the same way—gradually and

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then gradually become comfortable with how it’s used in various

contexts as we try it out ourselves.

z Most of us can rate our knowledge of a particular word on a scale

of 1 to 4, using the levels proposed by the educational researcher

Edgar Dale:

1. I do not know the word, and I have never seen it before.


2. I’ve heard of the word before, but I’m not sure what it means.