Start with my video presentation from the UNC Writing Center about vocabulary learning strategies!
Here are some websites that focus specifically on academic vocabulary:
1. The Academic Word List [the 560 most frequent word families in academic writing. Maybe.]
2. Vocabulary in EAP [advice and practice]
3. AWL Practice Exercises [useful]
4. The Compleat Lexical Tutor [lots of useful tools, but need to learn how to use them]
5. Academic Vocabulary [advice and exercises from the University of Nottingham, UK]
6. The Oxford 3000 Lists [new lists of the most frequent words in general, scientific, and business language.]
Using a Corpus to Learn Vocabulary:
For an introduction to using corpus searches to learn language, please watch my two video presentations from UNC: Part 1: Real World English; Part 2: Advanced Corpus Searching.
- Corpus of Contemporary American English — huge corpus of written and spoken texts. Start here!
- Other corpora from Mark Davies at BYU (TIME, British National Corpus)
- The Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) — new corpus of good graduate and undergraduate student writing at the University of Michigan
- The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) — lectures, discussions, office hours, etc.
- Lexical Tutor (works best in Internet Explorer) — great set of tools, including the Vocab Profiler, Key Word Extractor, and List Learning software
- AntConc — freeware software for building your own corpus. Easy to use. Includes tutorials and videos.
- Collins Concordance Sampler
Learning and Using Roots and Affixes
[Roots are the stems of words, especially those borrowed from Latin and Greek. Suffixes and prefixes (together called affixes) are the bits you stick on the beginning and ends of words. Eg: trans/port/ation]
- Word Info — a great source for Latin/Greek root words
- Lists of roots and affixes with translations and examples
- A better organized list of roots and affixes; includes math and science word parts
- LexTutor – many tools for vocabulary study
- Helen Huntley, Essential Academic Vocabulary (Heinle/Cengage, 2006) — book
- A rather silly but fun children’s game based on word parts is available here — just click cancel when it tries to print!
- Vocabulary University is aimed at secondary-school students, but you might learn something new there.
- Spelling practice with affixes
- Finally, two practice activities from the National Council of Teachers of English: Make a Word / Study Sheet
Online tools for vocabulary learning
(Some of these sites work better in Internet Explorer than Firefox.)
- Vocabulary Levels Tests (needs Internet Explorer)
- The Academic Word List
- AWL Practice Exercises
- The Oxford 3,000 (includes lists of science, business, and arts words)
