Developing college vocabulary E75
There are other benefits to developing a solid vocabulary. Both your reading and listening comprehension will improve if you know more about words. As you will learn in Chapter 3, you can’t remember what you don’t understand. In college all of your courses build upon one another so it is important to understand and remember the basic concepts and languages from your entry-level course in order to do well in those that follow.
There are 2 important strategies to help you figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words: looking for context clues and word part analysis.


Context Clues
One way to work out the new meaning of new words is to relate it to familiar words in a sentence and use those words as a context clues.

Types of Context Clues
1) Definition
2) Example
3) Punctuation
4) Personal Experience, opinion and knowledge

Word Part Analysis
To analyze words, you should break them up into smaller parts: roots, prefixes, and suffixes. These parts provide you with word clues, which you can use to decipher unfamiliar words.

Roots
A word’s root is its most basic part, or building block. It is as fundamental to word’s meaning as a root is to a plant: you will not get a geranium from a tulip bulb, nor will you get a word that means “love” from the root phobia. Understanding the root of a word is keys to understanding it.
An important way to make new words a part of your regular vocabulary is to use them in your everyday speech and writing. Writing in your journal daily will help.