Writing II: about vocabulary

Vocabulary is VERY important for learning English. To be sure of making progress during your 4 years at University, you should always be looking for ways to improve your vocabulary, even when your teachers don't give you specific activities or homework.

In this course, the main way we will use to learn vocabulary is using the Wordwise Dictionary. Although you bought this in the first semester, there wasn't time to use it in class. In the second semester, let's use it every week!

The Wordwise Dictionary is a monolingual dictionary (an English-English dictionary). That means you can get double benefits, i.e. learning the word you look up, and then learning more from reading the definitions and examples.

But there are many monolingual dictionaries. The Wordwise Dictionary is special for another reason. If you look through the dictionary, you will see that some of the words are in blue boxes. These words are the most important 2000 words of English. These 2000 words have been discovered through careful research over many years. If you know only these 2000 words, you can understand about 80% of most things you read and hear. If you don't know these 2000 words thoroughly, you will find it very difficult to make progress in English.

Every week, I'd like 3 or 4 people to make exercises for the other members of the class. The exercises should be fill-in-the-blanks exercises using the definitions in the Wordwise Dictionary. Most of the exercises should be based on the basic 2000 words. You should choose words that you think some students may not know, or words that everyone knows but may be difficult to use in some way.

We'll make a schedule for the exercises. If, for example, you are scheduled for Week 2, your exercises have to be ready on your blog before the beginning of the lesson in Week 3. So that I can tell everyone where the exercises are, you need to give me the URL (address) of the exercises you made. The easiest way is to put the URL on my blog as a comment.

When you do the exercises made by other students, copy the exercises from the blogs of the people who made the questions and paste them into your blog. Then type the answers, too. It's probably better to put the answers below the questions, so that you cannot see them easily. This will help you revise before tests. The first 20 minutes of each class will be for you to use to do the exercises and do anything else you like to learn vocabulary.

That's right, tests! In addition to blogging, your assessment will depend on your performance in vocabulary tests (at least one, at the end of the semester, and probably one or two more during the semester). The questions in the tests will be taken from the exercises made by everybody during the semester.