“It Pays to Increase Your Word Power!”
Originally uploaded by luv4sams
This is the title of a regular column in the popular monthy magazine, Readers Digest. (a digest here means a summary of the main points) Each month they introduce the reader some new words and their meanings, with a view to enriching our vocabulary-ie increase your word power.
In geography we want to increase your word power. Geography is the description of place and there fore we can use lots of adjectives to paint a full, detailed and interesting picture of different parts of the world-maybe a city, a mountain, a river or a rain Forest.
Throughout the session, we shall be introducing many new words and terms. The first time you meet a new word, you will highlight it in your jotter, and you’ll add its definition. All new words will also go in a separate page of this blog called the Word Bank. As the session proceeds, you will see more words go into the word bank. You can find this page by going to the right hand pane of the blog, look for the heading “pages” and click on “Word Bank”.
Learner-created glossaries are an interesting exercise. I am doing similar work with our pain management trainees covering areas as diverse as diagnoses, molecular biology and clinical psychology. The next stage is to develop an ontology with domain-specific terms, definitions, relations between classes and rules. Ontologies are becoming increasingly important in information management, the semantic web and interdisciplinary working. They are a powerful educational tool for describing a domain of interest.