Dealing with unfamiliar vocabulary
Whenever we ask readers, teachers and students
what seems to be their biggest problem in reading the Bangkok Post,
almost everyone immediately answers “vocabulary!”. It is true that
inexperienced readers are likely to find a great deal of unfamiliar
vocabulary in the Bangkok Post, but that is not really a “problem”.
As we hope to show you, it is really an “opportunity” for you to
increase your vocabulary to a level where you can use English effectively
in school or at work.
One way to do this is, of course, to make a serious effort to learn
new vocabulary by using your dictionary to look up the large number
of the unfamiliar words you run across in our newspaper. That is
not the method we are going to recommend, however. Besides being
rather boring, overuse of the dictionary can actually interfere
with your understanding of the stories you read. It slows down your
reading speed so much that it is difficult to see how ideas fit
together. Instead, we are going to suggest two extremely useful
strategies for increasing your vocabulary and your reading comprehension
at the same time. We strongly suggest you begin with the section
on context.
