The main aids for increasing your word power are the Net Dictionary and Web Concordancer which are linked to reading and other exercises either directly through hyperlinked items in the text or by means of Active Dictionary pages which use the "point-&-click dictionary" function that dynamically links any word in the text to the dictionary.

The Vocabulary Window

In many of the VLC exercises, the Vocabulary window appears at the bottom of the frame. This allows you look up words in the Net Dictionary by typing in the edit box, or else you can double-click on a word in the text and see the dictionary entry displayed here.

The Vocabulary window

The example below illustrates this and is taken from the the Listen and learn section which integrates RealAudio sound files with text. Other texts which feature this same approach include exercises in the News from the Web ESL Corner and the Reading for fun pages.

Many VLC texts and exercises have vocabulary items listed separately for study before doing the exercise. Below is an example.

The vocabulary items are first listed in a table in the main frame with links to the lexicon frame at the bottom. A click of the mouse is all that is required to produce the result shown in the lexicon frame below. The lexicon lookup has found the entry and displays its Chinese and other entries in the table as shown.

The dictionary links directly to the concordancer to see examples of the word.

Text Profiling for Vocabulary Study.

Other special VLC features which enable you to more easily study and identify vocabulary for texts are the Unique Word and Word Frequency text profile utilities. These enable you to list all the words used in any text, and compare the words with word frequency lists which are displayed in different colours. You can see easily how many words in a text are common or unusual, and these are also Active Dictionary pages so that any words can be referred to the dictionary.   

A Word Frequency Profile for a Text

You can do this for any text by pasting the text into the Text Area provided. If it is a VLC text use the brower Edit Menu functions to select and copy the text. Some VLC texts already provide word profiles which can be viewed by clicking the links. All the texts in the Cloze and Reading Comprehension sections have word profiles.