How can I increase my vocabulary efficiently(ESL)?

I'm just wondering how I can increase my vocabulary to enjoy books, news programs and podcasts in English.To put it broadly, I assume there's two common schools of thought:

a)Cramming with workbooks

For instance, I have two books that contains around 2000 words respectively, along with their definitions(in my primary language), pronunciations and example sentences.You might have read such books when you were studying to pass SAT or GRE.If I read these books again and again, say cover to cover for 10 times or such, I can theoretically remember 4000 most commonly used words.

b)Voracious reading with a dictionary in hand

This can be done with just reading relatively easy, short news/magazine articles or books and look up unknown words in a monolingual dictionary from a famous publisher, say American Heritage or Cambridge for instance.What I've been giving a try for a few days is that I pick up a short news article, look up words I don't know and read the article out loud with audio for 20 times or such.The problem is, however, there may be a redundancy in this method; I do come across words I've never heard of, but how should I put it, part(or perhaps even most) of them are seemingly not of primarily importance for ESL learners.Some words are treated as vital in a corpus while the others are not at all.

Some say method a) is the way to go simply because it's the quickest way and allows me to memorize most essential words carefully selected from a linguistic corpus, while others assert that method b) is scientifically more effective because learners can memorize words in a real context that is actually written by native speakers and thus consolidates his/her memory.Take those into perspective, which way would you say is more efficient?

Edit: The reason I read an article aloud twenty times each session is that I have quite a bit limited speaking skill and thus want to work on it too along with vocabulary building.

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