Academic word families: reading faster by knowing more

A reading passage rarely stops you with one unknown word. It slows you down with ten half-known ones: you recognise "analysis" but hesitate at "analytical", or you know "significant" and lose a second on "significance". Learning words as families removes many of those small pauses.

What a word family is

A word family is a base word and its related forms. Learn one and you have partly learnt the others, because the meaning carries across even when the part of speech changes.

• analyse (verb), analysis (noun), analyst (a person), analytical (adjective), analytically (adverb)
• significant (adjective), significance (noun), significantly (adverb), signify (verb), insignificant (adjective)

When you meet "analytically" for the first time, "analyse" is already doing most of the work, and the ending tells you what job the word does in the sentence. The same knowledge helps in gap tasks. In "The ____ of the discovery was not clear until years later", the gap needs a noun, so "significance" fits where "significant" and "significantly" do not.

Where to find words worth learning

Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List groups about 570 word families that appear often across university-level texts in many subjects. It was made for academic English in general, not for PTE, so it cannot tell you which words a particular test will contain. It is still a sensible source of common academic vocabulary: assume, estimate, factor, indicate, policy, sector, structure and theory are all on it. You can find the list online by searching for its name.

Do not work through it from A to Z. Use it as a checklist instead: when a new word turns up in your own reading, a family that is on the list is a good one to learn properly.

Prefixes and suffixes: free information

Prefixes change the meaning. Suffixes change the job the word does.

• Prefixes: un-, in-, im-, ir- and il- (not), re- (again), mis- (wrongly), over- and under- (too much, too little). From estimate you get overestimate and underestimate. From interpret you get misinterpret and reinterpret.
• Suffixes: -ation and -ment make nouns (interpretation, establishment), -al, -ive and -ous make adjectives, -ly makes adverbs, and -ise makes verbs.

A worked example

Here is a sentence of my own. Imagine you have never seen the three key words:

Take each one apart. Interpretation is interpret plus -ation, a noun for the act of explaining something. Inconsistent is in- (not) plus consistent, so "not matching". Assumptions comes from assume, with the -ption ending making a noun, so "things taken for granted". The meaning arrives without a dictionary: their explanation of the results did not match what they had taken for granted earlier.

If you already knew the three families, you would have read that sentence once and moved on. That is the whole point.

A twenty-minute routine

1. Five minutes: choose. Pick three families from today's reading or from the list, and copy the sentence where you met each one. In a learner's dictionary, find every member of each family and write it down with its part of speech.
2. Seven minutes: use. For each family write two sentences of your own, using two different members, for example one noun and one adjective. Sentences about your own work or studies are easier to remember than dictionary examples.
3. Five minutes: review. Cover the page and test yourself on the families from yesterday, from three days ago and from a week ago.
4. Three minutes: spot. Skim a paragraph from any article and underline every family member you have learnt so far. Seeing them in the wild is the point of the exercise.

Spaced review simply means seeing a word again just before it fades. The schedule in step three (a day, then three days, then a week) is easy to keep. If you forget a word at review, it goes back to the start of the cycle, and that is normal.

For your next step, choose three families from something you read today and do steps one and two tonight. Then try a reading task in the practice tests on this site and notice which words slow you down. For how these words behave in gaps, see collocations and word forms, and for a wider plan, a vocabulary routine for PTE.