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READ THIS
A good vocabulary goes a long way to enabling a literate person.
Much of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland owes its humour to playing around with the meaning
of words.
Do you understand the meaning of words?
VOCABULARY & GRAMMAR
Vocabulary is something that one acquires mostly from reading a great deal. So is grammar and spelling.
In a massive experiment in Scotland sometime in the early 1980s, two large samples of school children
were tested on the effects of reading.
Both groups were equal in size as well as literary and academic ability.
Before the experiment took place, they were tested with a standard grammar paper. This set the
benchmark for their future achievement.
The first group then spent four years with standard grammar teaching as would be expected at an average
school. They also studied the standard literature course but the emphasis was on grammar and spelling.
The second group was taught no grammar or spelling whatever. Instead, they were subjected to an
intense literature course for the next four years. Read, and read, and read.
After four years, the two groups were brought together and again wrote a standard grammar paper.
One would have expected that the children who had been taught lots of grammar would have achieved
the better results. This should have been the case.
Not so. The children who had done no grammar whatever but had been immersed in lots and lots of
literature came up tops.
The point is that grammar, vocabulary and spelling is absorbed naturally through wide reading. One can
learn grammar till the cows come home but it will be of no use whatever if one is not reading profusely.
Are you reading? Are you immersing yourself in literature? Reading as much as you can?
Please do so. That is the only way to success in English.
Have you looked at the questions
in the right column?
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