Can Reading Help Your Vocabulary? (Answered!)

You’ve probably heard that reading is key to a healthy mind and is a great exercise for your brain. But what makes it so special? Why should you squeeze in time to read every day? Does it improve vocabulary?

Reading helps to improve your vocabulary significantly. The more you read, the more extensive your vocabulary will be. Reading also improves your conversation, comprehension skills, and cognitive abilities. It also helps develop a profound understanding of the language you read.?

People who read regularly have a better vocabulary and develop a greater understanding of how to use words to express themselves than those who don’t read. A rich vocabulary also helps you express your thoughts and ideas more easily and get them across more effectively.

In this post, we’ll discuss how reading is a valuable asset that helps expand your active vocabulary, how reading books helps to achieve this, and some practical tips to help maximize your reading potential. Let’s begin.

What is the relationship between reading and vocabulary?

A good vocabulary is more important than what you might think. From developing incredible conversation skills to expanding your knowledge base, a good vocabulary impacts your life on many levels. Therefore, even in everyday conversations, its relevance shouldn’t be underestimated.

Reading and vocabulary have a direct proportional and mutual relationship. Reading exposes you to new words, so the more you read, the better your vocabulary will be. Vocabulary, in turn, leads to better comprehension as you’re exposed to more words.?

Vocabulary is the words you use daily to communicate or express your thoughts. Thus, vocabulary takes center stage when learning to read, pushing your brain to its memory limits and improving your reading comprehension skills.

On the other hand, reading is a complicated process involving the simultaneous interaction of the?four cue systems: phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic.

• The phonological system is what you hear inside your head when reading, a concept known as subvocalization.?
• Syntactic cues are the order of words in the text you’re reading or the grammar clues that help build the relationships between words.?
• The semantic cues refer to the vocabulary.?
• The schematic cues are the clues you generate in your mind based on your previous knowledge.

When used simultaneously, all these cues help you read more effectively, understand your reading, and improve your vocabulary.

You now know how vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension are closely associated. What needs to be clarified is how this association is interpreted. One interpretation can be that individual differences in reading ability contribute to the differences in vocabulary.

Reading something daily will expose you to more printed new words and develop a larger vocabulary over time. In contrast, if you’re not fond of reading a lot, you’ll have limited vocabulary exposure and a lack of reading skills, which hampers your vocabulary development.

Furthermore, vocabulary and reading are interrelated as they share common processes. Growing your vocabulary means mapping the semantic meaning of a particular word to its phonological form. Similarly, reading depends on connecting an expression’s semantic, phonological, and?orthographic units.

So, any weaknesses in these underlying processes, such as difficulties in acquiring information from text or deficits in memory, can contribute to poor vocabulary and, ultimately, poor reading skills.

You can check out our?Personal Productivity course, which helps you make time for reading while also boosting your productivity.

How important is reading?

Vocabulary and reading are both important concepts for any written language. It is recommended to read for at least fifteen minutes every day.?

Keep reading here...