Exercises

Exercise 1

Find an article written by a native speaker (i.e. an American, Briton, Canadian, etc.) on a topic that is related to your field of studies. Copy it into the Highlighter mentioned at Academic Vocabulary and see how many words from the lists they used. Make a note of the words you do not know: write down the context (that is: the sentence) in which you found them, their translation and which word(s) are connected to them: the word instruction has words like to instruct, instructor, instructive connected to it.

Now try to rewrite the sentence in which you found the word, using one of the other word forms.

Example: The instruction he gave us was clear  ==> He instructed us clearly. (also see how clear changes to clearly!)

Exercise 2

On the same web page you can turn the text you have chosen into a gap-fill text. Click on one of the three buttons you find there and try to fill in the missing words.

Exercise 3

Go on the Internet or to the bookshop and read an article on a topic that you like. This could be anything from football to photography and science fiction, as long as you are interested in it. However, this time, do not read it so much for the information, but for the words: which words are used in which context, does that make them formal, jargon, slang? Make a list of those words and put them in your notebook. You could even test yourself by copying part of the texts in the Gapmaker mentioned above.

You could use the following sites for this exercise:

• The Independent
• IT World
• The Architecture Week
• ASCE
• Engineers Australia
• World Soccer

Exercise 4

Write a one-page summary of a project you did during your study. When you have finished, run it through the AWL Highlighter at Academic Vocabulary (level 6) to see how many of the words are actually mentioned in the list. Make a list of the words that are highlighted to see how many different words from the academic list there are in your work.

Now see if you can rewrite your summary using different forms of the words that you have used, as explained above. (The instruction he gave us was clear  ==> He instructed us clearly.)