Increasing the Passive Vocabulary in German

Abstract

EVERY teacher of a foreign language strives to increase the student's passive vocabulary when teaching reading. Teachers of German quite generally employ the rules for the derivation and the compounding of words in order to develop in the student the power to infer the meanings of new words. The writer of this article has no magic method to offer, but wishes to submit a study which he made some years ago and which he has used with reasonable success in second-year reading classes. Various grammars supplied the rules of derivation, and the writer needed only to collect and systematize the rules. Sometimes the grammars illustrate the rules with words of infrequent use. To avoid this mistake the writer selected examples from a master vocabulary which he had constructed by tabulating the vocabularies of one hundred texts used in American schools. Thus, the German words of this study are likely to occur frequently in reading material. The study falls into two parts: I. Increasing Vocabulary by Rule; II. Increasing Vocabulary by Studying Word-Families.' In using such a list the teacher supplies English meanings whenever it is necessary to do so. I