Enhancing Student Vocabulary

In this blog, I'm sharing some of the benefits and strategies of creating an information-intensive environment for students.

An information-intensive environment is one that encourages active engagement and interaction with texts, leading to enhanced vocabulary acquisition. Students are exposed to a wealth of print and digital texts from various genres and subject areas, which introduce them to a wide array of vocabulary and provide opportunities to encounter new words in different contexts. This helps them to expand their vocabulary breadth (the number of words they know) and depth (how well they know them).

Some of the benefits of having an information-intensive environment for vocabulary development are:

  • It fosters students’ curiosity and interest in words, which motivates them to learn more.
  • It helps students to develop word consciousness, which is the awareness of and sensitivity to words and their meanings.
  • It enables students to learn words incidentally, which means learning words without explicit instruction or intention.
  • It supports students to learn words from multiple sources and modalities, which enhances their memory and retention of words.
  • It facilitates students to use words in authentic and meaningful ways, which improves their communication and comprehension skills.

Some of the strategies for creating an information-intensive environment for vocabulary development are:

  • Provide a rich and diverse collection of print and digital texts for students to access, such as books, magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, etc.
  • Encourage students to actively read, annotate, and discuss texts, allowing them to engage with new words in meaningful ways.
  • Teach students how to use context clues, word parts, dictionaries, and other resources to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words.
  • Introduce students to word families, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, idioms, and other word relationships that can help them expand their vocabulary networks.
  • Incorporate word games, puzzles, quizzes, and other activities that can make vocabulary learning fun and challenging.

I hope this blog has some useful insights into how an information-intensive environment can enhance student vocabulary.

To learn more about this topic, you can check out some of the sources I used for this blog:

1: A reference work entry on vocabulary development in early language education.

2: An original research article on the effects of different learning environments on vocabulary size and reading comprehension.

3: A blog post on the benefits of an information-intensive environment for vocabulary learning.

Thank you for reading this blog. Have a great day! 😊



Location: Lagos, Nigeria

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About me..

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In 2012, I completed my engineering degree in electronics and communications from an institution in India. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to pursue a career immediately after graduation due to my marriage and relocation to Africa with my family in 2013. Subsequently, the birth of our daughter further occupied my attention such that I could not focus on developing my career.   
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