The Teaching of Vocabulary

The Teaching of Vocabulary

                Traditionally, the teaching of vocabulary above elementary levels was mostly incidental limited to presenting new items as they appeared in reading or sometimes listening texts. This indirect teaching of vocabulary assumes that vocabulary expansion will happen through the practice of other language skill, which has been proved not enough to ensure vocabulary expansion.

                There are several aspects of lexis that need to be taken into account when teaching vocabulary. This list below is based on the work of Gairns and Redman (1986):

·         Boundaries between conceptual meanings: knowing not only what lexis refers to, but also where the boundaries are that separate it from words of related meaning (e.g. cup, mug, and bowl).

·         Polysemy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form with several but closely related meanings (e.g. head: of a person, of a pin, of an organization).

·         Homonymy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form which has several meanings which are not closely related (e.g. a file: used to put papers in or a tool).

·         Homophony: understanding words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meaning (e.g. flour, flower).

·         Synonymy: distinguishing between the different shades of meaning that synonymous words have (e.g. extends, increase, expand).

·         Affective meaning: distinguishing between the attitudinal and emotional factors (denotation and connotation), which depend on the speaker attitude or the situation.

·         Style, register, dialect: being able to distinguish between different levels of formality, the effect of different contexts and topics, as well as differences in geographical variation.

·         Translation: awareness of certain differences and similarities between the native and the foreign language.

·         Chunks of language: multi-word verbs, idioms, strong and weak collocations, lexical phrases.

·          Grammar of vocabulary: learning the rules that enable students to build up different forms of the word or even different words from that word ( e.g. sleep, slept, sleeping; able, unable, disability ).

·         Pronunciation: ability to recognize and reproduce items in speech.

The implication of the aspects just mentioned in teaching is that the goals of vocabulary teaching must be more than simply covering a certain number of words on a word list. We must use teaching techniques that can help realize this global concept of what it means to know a lexical item. And we must also go beyond that, giving learner opportunities to use the items learnt and also helping them to use effective written storage systems.

 Taken from, Syafni Zardia, Thesis, unpublished