Building a Better Vocabulary: Lecture 2 The Spelling-Meaning Connection

 

We discussed five core principles of effective vocabulary learning: starting with clear definitions, putting words into context, making connections between known concepts and new words, exploring the morphology and etymology of words, and chunking words by meaning in our mental lexicons. This last principle takes advantages of the fact that our minds organize information, including words, according to schema, or mental file folders. In this lecture, we'll delve a bit deeper into the morhpological system of english to explore one of the big "secrets" of vocabulary learning: Just as our minds organize language, so, too, language has a system for organizing words.

 

Instead, most people who possess large
vocabularies acquire them through reading. As adults, we pick
up the vast majority of new vocabulary incidentally through
meaningful reading in connected text.

Most people who have a deep, broad, flexible vocabulary are also avid readers.

 

This doesn’t mean that we should give up on studying vocabulary
directly. But if we’re serious about improving vocabulary, in
addition to wide reading, we need to be strategic and thoughtful
about how we study words--in particular, using the five principles
we’ve already discussed. Our language itself helps us in this study
by organizing words by meaning—if we know how to look for
this system.
 

English has a built-in system of meaning, or morphology, that
is largely based on the classic Greek and Latin origins of our
language. In fact, approximately 70 percent of English vocabulary
is derived from Greek and Latin roots and affixes, Those who know
how to harness this morphological system are at a great advantage,
not only when it comes to learning more words but also when it
comes to storing them in their mental lexicons.

the spelling-meaning connection states: “Words that are related in
spelling are often related in meaning, despite changes in sound.”