How to work with LEMMA  

The LEMMA vocabulary tests are designed to find out how many words your PASSIVE vocabulary contains. A word belongs to your passive vocabulary when you understand what it means, even though maybe you will not actively use this word in your oral or written communication. A person's passive vocabulary is often twice as large as his/her active vocabulary. There are many words you know which you do not remember when you need them!

In the LEMMA vocabulary test you are presented with one basic word (or lemma) and five different words which we call "distractors". One of these distractors has a strong connexion to the lemma - it may be a synonym to the lemma (i.e. mean the same thing) or "almost" a synonym. Many words can also be closely associated to the lemma.

Example:

In the first row, the right distractor is "power", which can be a synonym of force. In the second, it is "bird" - not all birds are hens, but a hen is a bird. In the third, it is "fork". Knife and fork are absolutely not synonyms, but the two words are very closely connected. They form a logical pair.

NOTE! In some rows of distractors, you may find that two or more could be possible matches. Your task is to find the best match.

How to do it 

You mark the distractor which you think is the best match. You can do this by using either your mouse or your keyboard. 

If you do not know a word, do not try to guess - mark "no answer". If you guess and the answer is wrong, the system will deduce points from your score.

Since the purpose of the test is to find out the size of your total English vocabulary, the test will probably contain words you do not know. You may come to a point in the test when you feel you do not know any words any longer. Continue with a few more words - you might suddenly know the meaning of a difficult one. If you give up, click on "Done", and you will get your results.

Although the vocabulary tests ask you to deal with one word at a time, this is not the way we use our vocabulary in real life. In reality vocabulary is part of a context - we use the words we know in complete sentences. The context exercises help you put the words you have worked with in the test in a context.

In the paragraph about how to "work with the vocabulary tests", we talked about "passive" and "active" vocabulary. By working with the context exercises right after you have taken a vocabulary test, you are working in a process that will move some of your vocabulary from the "passive storage room" to the "active memory". You will be asked to remember and use the words you previously only understood passively and some of the ones you did not understand as well! Working assiduously with these vocabulary tests and context exercises will increase your active vocabulary.

You will be presented with

1. the right "distractor" (the answer to this particular item in the test)
2. a sentence where a word is missing (but you get the first letter or letters in the word as a help, and you can also see how many letters the word contains)
3. an empty space to write your answer - what was the lemma here? Which word is missing?

Right after you have taken a vocabulary test, it may be a good idea to try to go through all the sentences connected with the words you have been exposed to in your test. However, if you want to go on practising, you can choose to go through only a certain amount of sentences, corresponding to the level of vocabulary you are at. You choose this from the main exercise menu, in LEMMA's first frame.

Using the keyboard: (Internet Explorer)

Vocabulary tests:

Choose your distractor in the first row by marking it with the mouse. Alternatively you can press the tab key five times to get to "no answer" in the first row.

Use the arrow keys to move horisontally. Press the tab key to move one row down. Press Shift/tab to move one row up.

Mark your alternative by pressing Enter or the space bar.

Context exercises:

You can use the tab key to move forward or use the mouse and mark the space following the letter or letters in the answer column.