Build Your English Vocabulary Notebook from Your Own Reading

In 2001, the vocabulary researchers Batia Laufer and Jan Hulstijn published “Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: the construct of task-induced involvement” in the journal Applied Linguistics. Their Involvement Load Hypothesis says that whether a new word stays with you depends on three things. Do you need to know it (need)? Do you look for its meaning yourself (search)? Do you choose, from several meanings, the one that fits the context (evaluation)?

Later studies have broadly supported the idea, though its predictions don’t always hold. So it doesn’t explain everything. Still, it is a useful way to look at why ready-made word lists are so hard to keep up with.

A word list from a book versus your own notebook

Published vocabulary books and frequency lists put words in order: the most common first, or the ones most likely to appear in an exam. Someone has already chosen what is worth learning, which makes them efficient. For covering the most common words of English one by one, it is hard to do better.

Seen through those three factors, though, a word list has no need in it. The words are not ones you wanted to know. Their meanings are already narrowed to one or two, so you neither search nor choose. When people can’t stick with a word list, the cause may be the way the list is made rather than a lack of willpower.

A notebook built from your own reading is the opposite. Every word in it is one you wanted to understand while reading. You looked it up and picked the meaning that fit the sentence from the several on offer. All three factors are there.

The price is that your own notebook is uneven. It only holds words from the books you have read, and some of them will be rare. One approach is to use both: a frequency list for the core words, and your own notebook for the words you meet in books.

Keep the sentence, not just the word

When you build your own notebook, you can copy the sentence you found the word in. If you write only the word and a translation, you have simply made your own copy of a word list.

Keeping the sentence keeps three things.

The first is the meaning in that sentence. Common English words have many meanings. Engaged can mean promised in marriage, busy, or in use, as with a phone line. With your sentence next to it, you can see at a glance which one it was.

The second is how the word is used: which preposition came with it, which words sat next to it. A translation doesn’t keep that.

The third is the memory of the scene. Remembering which book the word came from, and what was happening, gives you one more way to recall it.

On paper

You don’t need an app for this. A notebook works. Here is one format.

1. Give each word its own box, with its base form at the top (run for ran).
2. Below it, copy the sentence you met it in. For a long sentence, the part around the word is enough.
3. Write the book title and chapter.
4. Write one meaning, the one that fits that sentence. Your own language or simple English both work.
5. When you meet the word again, make a mark in the corner and add the new sentence.

To review, cover the word with your hand and read only the sentence. If you can recall what goes in the gap, you know the word. If not, check the meaning and read the sentence again.

Words with many marks are words that keep coming up in that book. To keep reading it, those are the ones to learn first.

The weak point of a notebook is the time it takes. If you try to write down every word, the notebook eats your reading time. There is no need to stop reading to write. You can just mark the word in the margin or on a slip of paper and write up the entries at the end of the chapter.

The Word Book in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad. It builds the kind of notebook described above while you read.

When you long-press a word and tap Look up, the built-in dictionary shows a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses. At the same time, the word is saved to the Word Book in the Words tab. It saves the base form, the form in the text, the meaning, the part of speech, the sentence you met it in, and the book title. If you look up the same word again, its lookup count goes up, and the sentence is replaced by the newer one.

The app doesn’t mark the text. Words you looked up are not coloured on the page, so the page stays as the book printed it.

You can filter the Word Book by book with From “