{"id":16277,"date":"2021-05-26T15:56:45","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T07:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/?p=16277"},"modified":"2021-05-26T16:01:45","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T08:01:45","slug":"learning-vocabulary-through-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/2021\/05\/learning-vocabulary-through-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Vocabulary through Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have always loved reading. As a child, I would devour one book after another. Gradually, I realised that my vocabulary was expanding without me consciously making an effort to grow it.<\/p>\n<p>Reading is a fantastic way to expose ourselves to a wide variety of vocabulary. Through reading fantasy novels like <i>The Lord of the Rings, <\/i>we can learn words such as \u2018kingdom,\u2019 \u2018curse\u2019 and \u2018sorcerer.\u2019 Detective stories like <i>Sherlock Holmes <\/i>introduce us to the words \u2018evidence\u2019 and \u2018suspect.\u2019 And I first came across the words \u2018orbit\u2019 and \u2018catastrophe\u2019 when I read science fiction books<i>. <\/i>Students will rarely study these words in their English textbooks, which focus mainly on vocabulary related to daily life.<\/p>\n<p>Reading teaches us how to infer the meaning of words. We often will encounter unfamiliar words when we read books. Instead of relying on a dictionary every time, we can deduce the word\u2019s meaning by looking at the whole sentence. Take the sentence, \u2018Artists <i>exaggerated<\/i> the king\u2019s features by painting him with a large face, big eyes and a long nose.\u2019 From other words in the sentence, we might guess that \u2018exaggerate\u2019 means \u2018to make something look bigger than it really is.\u2019 That\u2019s very close to the dictionary definition, and encountering the word a few more times will help us really grasp its full meaning. Reading equips us with the important skill of inference, thus helping us to learn new words.<\/p>\n<p>Reading also helps us to remember words through repetition. Children\u2019s books in particular will use the same words or sentence patterns repeatedly. This helps us to remember new words and how they are used. In <i>Yertle the Turtle<\/i>, Dr Seuss writes, \u2018I\u2019m king of the trees! I\u2019m king of the birds! And I\u2019m king of the bees! I\u2019m king of the butterflies!\u2019 I\u2019m sure that every reader will firmly remember the word \u2018king.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Every book opens the door to a new world of words. The more we read, the more our vocabulary will grow. So pick up a book and start reading!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have always loved reading. As a child, I would devour one book after another. Gradually, I realised that my vocabulary was expanding without me consciously making an effort to grow it. Reading is a fantastic way to expose ourselves to a wide variety of vocabulary. Through reading fantasy novels like The Lord of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":16278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[825],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16279,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16277\/revisions\/16279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}