Response for Nation's Ideas

What a high quality article! Somehow it needs much effort to comprehend the whole Nation’s ideas. Well, in my opinion, I totally agree that vocabulary is an important component for constructing the four English skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing). Without vocabulary, it will be difficult for someone to convey what in his/her mind is.

Based on my experience, the students still feel difficult in guessing the meaning of English words when they do not know what the real meaning is. Therefore, it can be a barrier for them to comprehend the next ideas. I think that learning vocabulary through reading is the most suitable solution to solve the problem because by reading a lot, the students will meet a lot of new words that they have to know the meaning to get the point of the ideas.

I remember when I was still a college student, my lecturer always gave me and my friends reading assignment that we usually called it extensive reading. Every week we should read English books as many as possible and make the written report at home. During the class, we made a small group and should retell what we had read. Time passed and we knew that it was very beneficial for our improvement.

I think there are also other ways to learn vocabulary. The key is the learners should feel happy when they do it. I am sure that they are very happy when they are asked to learn vocabulary through playing games, browsing Professor Google, chatting in Facebook instead of reading academic research articles just like what I did (haha.. just kidding :)

After learning vocabulary, the learners may measure their vocabulary size. I twice visited the link as mentioned: I did not finish my first try because it was break time and I did not have adequate time to answer all of the questions. A few days later, I tried again and committed to finish all of the questions and the result was not bad and not good (haha..) as there are so many unfamiliar words that I hesitated to answer, so I chose “I don’t know”. Frankly speaking, we are used to using common English words, not the complicated ones in class. It makes us easier in communicating with all levels of learners. However, perhaps later I will ask the students to visit the link and assure them that the purpose of this activity is just for fun instead of assessing them.

By the way, I think a bilingual or monolingual vocabulary size test does not make any differences. It depends on the need. The test may provide two or more sentences, so the test-taker who does not know the meaning can guess it from its context. Cheers.