English Vocabulary Lessons

Level up your English skills through vocabulary lessons with a private teacher

The English language features more than 170,000 words that are in current use by native speakers. It can be completely overwhelming for an English student to even consider memorising all of them. But we must remember that while all of these words exist, some of them are only used in specific activities like business, or only found in text and rarely used in speech. In fact, the majority of native speakers have a vocabulary that is made up of about 25,000 words.

The good thing is that students really only need to learn and memorise the best 800 word families in order to follow a normal conversation. This number increases with more complex types of media, like TV, which takes around 3,000 word families or reading a book which will take around 8,000.

Learning commonly used vocabulary is an important step for language learning instruction. You can teach every grammar rule in the book, but if people don't know any of the verbs, how will they be able to conjugate them? Knowing that adjectives come before nouns is great, but not if you don't know any adjectives. Spending the time to expand your vocabulary can really the best help in taking your English skills to the next level!

Let's look at some of the topics you could look at in private English word classes:

Learning Vocabulary for a specific context

It might seem strange to take a class just to learn vocabulary, but for some people, it's actually a great plan. For example, someone who has quite high-level grammar skills might need to learn words that are related to specific content related to their work like teaching, business etc. Here are some of the topics that people might need to learn about in a little more depth:

Idioms and Phrasal Verbs

Phrasal verbs are usually made up of two or three words, a verb and a preposition or adverb, and it can be difficult or nearly impossible to understand their meaning if you've never seen them before. For example, can you tell the difference in meaning between break up and break off? Or look up to or look forward to? While context helps, it's not always enough to truly understand.

Instead, idioms are longer phrases that have a completely different meaning to the literal meaning of the word in the sentence. Did that class really cost an arm and a leg? These are a fun part of every language and can help students to understand a little more about slang and casual conversation. If you plan to take word lessons, make idioms and phrasal verbs part of each class!

Business English

Many students are learning English to get further in their careers. However, a general English course might not be the best place to learn the language you'll need to shine, or even get by, in the workplace. Those courses are generally more focused on casual grammar and conversation. A business English course would include teaching the phrases you'd need in common business situations, from answering the phone to presenting a business proposal. In each lesson, your tutor could teach business phrasal verbs, adjectives for describing particular products or ways to give polite instructions.

Activities to help students improve their vocabulary retention skills

Some students may find it easy to memorise words just by reading or writing them a few times. However, for the average student building up a strong vocabulary (that you actually understand and can reuse in context) takes lots of time and work day after day. While there's no shortcut to learning new words, there are some activities and exercises you could try in lessons that might just help you with each new word:

Don't expect to see a word once and remember it

There are a few steps between seeing a new word in class and being able to use it fluently in conversation. First, you'll need to be able to see the word and quickly connect it to its meaning and use. This means you'll need to see the word in context multiple times, using things like a picture or a story to remember it. Then you'll need to hear it spoken so you can copy the cadence and stress. You have to then practice producing it, it's always a good idea to start with writing it down in sentences. Finally, you'll need to hear and use it in an everyday context multiple times. Now imagine doing all of these steps with every word in the English language! No wonder it takes so much time and so many lessons even to just move up one level. So if you're in the classroom and notice that your teachers often teach and review the same words, don't get frustrated. They're just trying to help you really remember the content from your lessons.

Reading, Reading, Reading

This might seem like a pretty obvious one, but it really cannot be overstated how much reading can help with learning and retaining new pieces of vocabulary. There are actually multiple reasons for this. Firstly, if a student chooses to read a book, they're probably at least a little interested in the topic. Unsurprisingly, this means that they will pay more attention and retain more of what they've read. Another important part of this activity is that students are learning words in the correct context, and not just random words written on a whiteboard.

Make your lessons fun!

Learning a language doesn't just have to be about grammar rules, conjugating verbs or learning about the difference between adjectives and adverbs. It's important that lessons are interesting to students, and that they're given activities that engage them and encourage them to produce words quickly and spontaneously. This is why things like games, a quiz or a conversation activity can actually be very effective in lessons. The students are still reviewing the vocabulary they need and will be able to connect it to a more interesting context.

So if you really want to reach a new level or grade with your English skills, you should really consider some private vocabulary instruction. Lesson by lesson you can do exercises that expand your knowledge base. Then you can do fun activities or games like a quiz or picture matching to review and recycle each new word.