Adding new words to your vocabulary

Updated on: Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The world of words is an ever expanding one with new words added to English dictionaries every year. In such a scenario, vocabulary building becomes an exercise of a lifetime.

The opening session of the Newspaper in Education (NIE) programme this year took off at Good Shepherd Matriculation Higher Secondary School with the spotlight trained on vocabulary enrichment.

“A good vocabulary is important to articulate expressions and thoughts fluently,” said NIE resource person Anuradha Umashankar, introducing students to the ‘Expand your vocabulary through newspaper' module.

Through a series of activities ranging from fairly simple to challenging Standard IX students learnt new words unwittingly, while engaged in wordplay. A word puzzle involving 15 words with 26 missing letters kept them intrigued for a time. As a rule that each of the 26 alphabets should be used only once was imposed, various permutations were tried to figure out the words.

As learning new words without knowing their usage cannot be of much help, students were asked to construct meaningful sentences with these words.

While the initial activity had students coming up with names of states and animals from of a given set of letters, the final activity called for donning of thinking caps.

The resource person set the class the task of coining a five word sentence, wherein each word should begin with the letter of a given word. Keeping with the times, the word turned out to be ‘scams' and students came up with sentences like ‘Sincerity can always meet success.'

Ms.Anuradha encouraged students to read the papers, jot down difficult words, find their meanings using a dictionary and use them in everyday speech and writing.

Adding new words to your vocabulary

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