Significance of Vocabulary Learning
There are excellent reasons for working hard to improve English vocabulary: people will be able to easily and quickly read and understand a broader variety of books, documents, and papers, have more confidence speaking in front of groups, with clients and customers, or one-on-one with your supervisors at work, and increased skills in writing and communication will help them further their career goals. With all of these benefits, college students would be surprised if anyone tried to impugn their motives in choosing to focus on vocabulary study.
If in small details, there are four points of the importance for the vocabulary learning:
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An extensive vocabulary helps expressions and communication.
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Vocabulary size has been directly linked to reading comprehension.
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Linguistic vocabulary is synonymous with thinking vocabulary.
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A person may be judged by others based on his or her vocabulary.
In conclusion of the significance of the vocabulary learning, there are two points of significance as follows:
1 Enhance one’s life
Why do large vocabularies characterize executives and possibly outstanding men and women in other fields? The final answer seems to be that words are the instruments by means of which men and women grasp the thoughts of others and with which they do much of their own thinking. They are the “tools of thought.“
Learning how to build a better vocabulary can be a pleasurable and profitable investment of both your time and effort. At least fifteen minutes a day of concentrated study on a regular basis can bring about a rapid improvement in your vocabulary skills, which in turn can increase your ability to communicate by writing, conversing, or making speeches. Acquiring a large vocabulary can benefit you in school, at work, and socially. It will enable you to understand others' ideas better and to have the satisfaction of getting your thoughts and ideas across more effectively
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2 Promote one’s academic success
One of the most persistent findings in reading research is that the extent of students’ vocabulary knowledge relates strongly to their reading comprehension and overall academic success. This relationship seems logical; to get meaning from what they read, students need both a great many words in their vocabularies and the ability to use various strategies to establish the meanings of new words when they encounter them. Young students who don’t have large vocabularies or effective word-learning strategies often struggle to achieve comprehension. Their bad experiences with reading set in motion a cycle of frustration and failure that continues throughout their schooling. Because these students don’t have sufficient word knowledge to understand what they read, they typically avoid reading. Because they don’t read very much, they don’t have the opportunity to see and learn very many new words. This sets in motion the well known “Matthew Effects,” Stanovich’s application of Matthew, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” In terms of vocabulary development, good readers read more, become better readers, and learn more words; poor readers read less, become poorer readers, and learn fewer words.
This particular relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension seems clear. But vocabulary knowledge contributes to reading success in other important ways that are perhaps less obvious. For beginning readers, evidence indicates a link between word knowledge and phonological awareness. Young children who have a large number of words in their oral vocabularies may more easily analyze the representation of the individual sounds of those words. In addition, vocabulary knowledge helps beginning readers decode, or map spoken sounds to words in print. If children have the printed words in their oral vocabulary, they can more easily and quickly sound out, read, and understand them, as well as comprehend what they are reading. If the words are not in children’s oral vocabulary, they have trouble reading the words and their comprehension is hindered. Thus, an extensive vocabulary is the bridge between the word-level processes of phonics and the cognitive processes of comprehension. The issue to address next, then, is just how many words do students need to know so as to read with comprehension? This is exactly what constitutes an “extensive” vocabulary.
In a word, building vocabulary is a powerful way to live conveniently and reach achievement more easily. Fortunately, a number of students have been aware of this. However, they have a few of problems in the process of learning vocabulary.