A Matter of Vocabulary
When I was about 10, I entered a Vocabulary Bee. It’s a competition where words are given by a panel and you are asked what it means. I went quite far in the school district and at the finals, I lost because I couldn’t distinguish between “distinguish” and “extinguish”. A voice in my head told me the right answer, but the spotlight pushed me to go against my better judgement. And so it began, a string of events that pushed me to go against that little voice. Ha ha.
But back to vocabulary. Since then, I haven’t witnessed any vocabulary bees. All I’ve seen so far are spelling bees. Poor ones at that.
Vocabulary, as I have recently discovered during my 1-month stint as Adam’s reading drill sargeant last December, is very important in helping a child learn how to read. My earlier conventional assumption was that reading leads to vocabulary, when, like all things you learn when you take the time to remove your assumptions and start from scratch, it was the other way around. Sort of.
Adam read better when I equipped him with new words. He had the confidence to guess longer words within the right context and hence, wasn’t so stumped when the phonics method took a bit longer to figure out.
So it delighted me to no end to discover how well Idris has been doing with his vocabulary. Just the other day, when I asked him what he was doing, he replied that he was ‘looking for something unusual’. Revisiting old movies (old by a 4 year-old’s standards) led me to discover other words that he knew the meaning of – like when he narrated the starting bit of Transformers 1: “Look Ibu, the cube has just become a meteor” – as the cube entered the earth’s atmosphere.
At 3, Fische took him to an aquarium in Langkawi. He pointed out the anemone and the various fish moving about around it. He has pointed out the names of a few dinosaurs and am watching out to see if he uses the word ‘evaporate’ in the right context some time soon.
As parents, the natural reaction (I think it’s natural because so many parents do it), is to dumb down what we say to kids. I say, don’t dumb down the vocabulary, just make your explanations simpler. When Idris doesn’t understand a what a word means, he just asks what it is. And that increases his vocabulary, even before he learns how to read.
Reference for younger children: A Language Boosting Game for Hannan
That’s one thing I always tell people: no baby talk. My mother was a stickler for that when I was a kid, and I was reading the newspaper by age four. Of course, since moving to Malaysia my vocabulary has suffered horribly. It’s like I’ve thrown out some English words I seldom use, to make way for Malay ones. Haha.
Jordan
23 Jun 10 at 2:07 pm
I’m always amazed when I talk to Idris. He tells me stories like an old soul, in complete detail just like the way it is in his mind. Failing more accurate vocabulary he will find a close replacement.
I hope I will live to see him at 35.
pickyin
23 Jun 10 at 8:59 pm