I will be helping a friend of mine expand her English vocabulary. I’m looking for anything in the way of context-based exercises and vocabulary lists that might be helpful, otherwise I might just be stuck fooling around with a thesaurus. Stuff around the SAT or GRE level would be great. Her primary language is Spanish.
She seems to have an excellent grasp of the mechanics, some idioms and humor, but she’s just overwhelmed by the sheer number of words that she doesn’t know. Anybody have anything useful? I don’t mind buying books but online resources would be appreciated also.
Thanks!
Grossbottom…
How about assigning her a reading list? I find that I learn most new words through reading “literary” books (i.e. not Harlequin).
-Cem
One of my favorite books about English vocab is I Always Look Up the Word “Egregious”. What I love about it is that it explores the roots of words and shows how one root leads to lots of other words (egregious, aggregate, and gregarious, for example.
All of which sounds really dry, but it’s written in a very down-to-earth, vibrant way that makes for fun reading. I’ve learned a ton about English from it, and have a new way of approaching words I haven’t seen before because of it.
I had an English Comp prof in college who used Time magazine to teach vocab. The assignment: Read Time every week, and write down all the words you don’t know. Look them up, and we’ll have a quiz every week. Time writers have a thing about using words you haven’t seen before, so there was always a scattering of new words.
Altho’ a tad overwhelming in terms of size this is a great series of books. It is designed for self study divided into themes with a page of explanations followed by a page of exercises, but you can help with extra explanations and real life contexts. As you can see there are Brit and Am. English versions.
Tip - I reccommend readin the explanation then leaving the exercises until the next day to see what you’ve remembered, or not.
I should have mentioned that my English Composition class with the Time magazine assignment was in 1968, and I can’t say if it would still be a good idea today.
The Word a Day site sends daily emails with a new vocabulary word, including pronunciation and sometimes etymology. It’s a free service and she might enjoy learning some odd words to stump you with.