4 Websites To Enrich Your English VOCABULARY
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
The first thing that anybody should focus on in learning any language is the vocabulary. Nobody will be able to use the language if they don’t understand the words. There are many resources that you can use to enrich your English vocabulary, and one of them is the Internet. Here are 10 websites that can help you expand your library of English words in no particular order.
Why is background knowledge so important?
How to build background knowledge
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| Websites Vocabulary Keywords |
Wordsmith (http://wordsmith.org/)
One of the services is the daily newsletter: a word a day delivered to your inbox.
Wordnik (http://www.wordnik.com/word-of-the-day)
Wordnik.com covers meanings through example sentences to audio pronunciations.
WordThink (http://www.wordthink.com/)
WordThink.com does not believe in learning new words just for the sake of learning. Its skips the more complicated words and goes in for words that you might use in your daily conversations.
Vocabsushi (http://www.vocabsushi.com/)
If you are hell bent on acing college tests like ACT, SAT, GMAT, GRE etc, try out Vocabsushi and its bite-size learning method.
Why is background knowledge so important?
It makes good sense that to comprehend a story or text, readers will need a threshold of knowledge about the topic. Sometimes we call it domain-specific knowledge or topical knowledge. Without such knowledge, it becomes difficult to construct a meaningful mental model of what the text is about. Consider the following examples.
The question then becomes, how do we build children's background knowledge? Core reading materials often encourage us to activate, support, build on, and tie to children's existing knowledge base. But what do we do when there is no existing knowledge base? Or when there is little to build on? If you asked us, for example, to read an elementary physics text building on our previous knowledge base of physics, you would likely see blank stares, akin to a deer in headlights.