Vocabulary

Building your vocabulary is something that you need to work on actively. Unfortunately, when we see a new word it does not automatically stay in our brain forever - we need to write it down, look at it, look at it again, use it, practise it, find related words and synonyms and so on. Think of it like doing exercise - no pain, no gain!

At university, having a wide range of vocabulary is very important. Here I've included a few links which might help you develop your own vocabulary:

For general vocabulary improvement, there's a very useful site called Lingro. It lets you convert a web page into a text which is 'clickable' for vocabulary definitions. You can also store words you define in Word Lists, and even test yourself on these at a later date:

Lingro

The Academic Word List

Academic vocabulary exercises

AWL - with definitions

General & Academic vocabulary exercises

More Academic Word list exercises

Vocabulary help 

The Academic Word List for Chinese speakers

An example corpus - BNC BYU


Subject glossaries

A 'glossary' is a list of words related to a particular subject. It's a good idea to look for a glossary related to your subject. This can give you an idea of how familiar you are with some of the specific vocabulary in your field. I have included some links to glossaries below - if you find a good glossary somewhere online, please let me know and I will add it to the list below:

Law

Legal English Vocabulary & Exercises 

Economics 
and here

Business

Marketing