Dear Maaniana and Sunflower,
Hello there.
Well regarding improving your vocab - if you are a student of English - there is no magic spell I am afraid - you have to put in the effort. However there are constructive things you can do.
Firstly read as much as possible in English - even if comic books are all you can manage - watch TV or movies - again watch BBC children's TV if your English is at a basic level.
Then keep a vocab book and learn a few new words each day. The trick is to revise them the next day, a week later, a month later and six months later - if you don't use it you lose it. So on day two you will be learning new words and revising words from the day before. After one week you'll learn new words and revise two lots of words etc. I think 10 new words per day is ample - given that after a month you will be reviewing 30 new words a day as well as learning 10 new ones.
For Sunflower and the difficulties in learning English - I think motivation is a big issue for teachers - how can a teacher keep their pupils interestesd or encourage interest in an unmotivated class, and also the fact that classes are too big to teach language effectively. I use games to keep interest and motivation up - and they work beautifully for that, and I also created an e-book of games to help teachers in class - including a special edition for large classes as I heard that in China classes can be up to 120 pupils.
I have heard back from some teachers using my large class e-book and they are reporting success - which is good news - because I myself have never taught that many pupils so I wasn't 100% sure the games would really work - although I thought that they would - but I can confirm now that they do!
I do not think that using games is the ultimate solution - that would be to cut class sizes down to small groups of 12, and to pay teachers proper wages so that many more quality people are attracted to the profession (to add to the many quality people already in it I hasten to add!) - however those things are not really any more likely to happen than we are likely to stop polluting the planet - so we had better find some good ways to work around the problems - and certainly using games in class is one of those.
I had better get back to work now.
Kind regards
Shelley
ESL games and activities for teaching English to children