Нефедова А.И.

Поволжская академия государственной службы,

филиал в г. Тамбове, Россия

Vocabulary and Language Teaching

Vocabulary teaching and learning has come a long way. Vocabulary pedagogy has benefited from theoretical advances in the linguistic study of the lexicon, from psycholinguistic investigations into the mental lexicon, from the communicative trend in teaching, which has brought the learner into focus, and from developments in computers.

It may be useful to begin by listing some questions which teachers and students have asked about vocabulary and language study: 1)how many words provide a working vocabulary in a foreign language? 2)what are the best words to learn first? 3)in the early stages of learning a foreign language, are some words more useful to the learner than others? 4)are some words more difficult to learn than others? 5)what are the best means of retaining new words? 6)is it most practical to learn words as single items in a list, in pairs or in context? 7)what about words with different meanings? Should they be avoided? If not, should some meanings be isolated for learning first? 8)are some words more likely to be encountered in spoken rather than written discourse? If so, do we know what are they?

It is impossible to teach learners all the words they need to know, and so it is important to teach them guessing strategies on dictionaries. This is the beginning of viewing vocabulary learning as a language skill, of shifting the responsibility to the learner. Vocabulary can be presented and explained but ultimately it is the individual who learns: students must learn how to learn vocabulary and fine their own ways of expanding and organizing their words stores, to personalize vocabulary expansion according to needs, purposes and goals.

We’d like to speak in favour of massive vocabulary instruction as early as possible and stress the importance of presenting vocabulary in a natural linguistic context; words taught in isolation are generally not retained. The full meanings of words can only come from encountering them in a rich linguistic environment. Crucially, words should be meaningful to the learner, words should be reviewed and revised constantly. The learner must be allowed to be vague about meaning at first, precision will come later.

We should make distinction between important vocabulary that should be pre-taught because it cannot be guessed from the text, vocabulary which can be guessed in context, and vocabulary which can be ignored and studied after using the text.

It is necessary to emphasize meaningful presentation of vocabulary in situations and contexts, the use of realia, pictures and mime in presentation, the activation of the learner’s background knowledge, the influence of role-play and group-work methodologies on vocabulary teaching.

Any discussion of vocabulary acquisition and of language performance in general needs to draw a clear distinction between comprehension and production, for these seem to be different skills that require different methods in the classroom. Comprehension of vocabulary relies on strategies that permit one to understand words and store them, to commit them to memory, that is, while production concerns strategies that activate one’s storage by retrieving these words from memory and by using them in appropriate situations. A number of researchers believe that comprehension should precede production in language teaching.

The first task is to help students to understand what unfamiliar words mean. It would be well at the beginning to assure them that they do not have to know all the words of a passage before they can understand its meaning, that, usually, a single mysterious word – 2 or 3 – will not prevent comprehension, and that it is this understanding of the text that will be their greatest aid in deciphering these difficult words. We must also assure them that they need not know all the meaning of any particular word, but that they can be content knowing only a general meaning for it. It is only after experiencing a word in its many contexts that one approaches a complete understanding of its meaning. Finally, we need to convince students that instead of looking up every word in a dictionary, they should rely on the kinds of techniques for discovering meaning. The dictionary means security for many; this cannot be a prohibition, but we should advise that the dictionary be used only as a last resort.

Guessing vocabulary from context is the most frequent way we discover the meaning of new words. First of all, our guesses are guided by the topic. Even a title provides effective clues for guessing. Secondly, we are guided by the other words in the discourse, which is full of redundancy, anaphora and parallelism, and each offer clues for understanding new vocabulary. Finally, grammatical structure, as well as punctuation in writing, contain further clues.

The following examples emphasize the redundancy of language by demonstrating the types of contexts which can provide the meaning of an unfamiliar word and help sharpen student’s ability to discover meaning through context alone.

Synonym in opposition: Our uncle was a nomad, an incurable wanderer who never could stay in one place.

Antonym: While the aunt loved Marty deeply, she absolutely despised his twin brother Smarty.

Cause and effect: By surrounding the protesters with armed policemen, and by arresting the leaders of the movement, the rebellion was effectively quashed.

Association between an object and its purpose or use: The scientist removed the treatise from the shelf and began to read.

Description: Tom received a new roadster for his birthday. It is a sport model, capable of reaching speeds of more than 150 mph.

Example: Mary can be quite gauche; yesterday she blew her nose on the new tablecloth.

So, vocabulary should be given a proper status as without grammar very little can be conveyed, but without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.