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particular, in a phrase, in a situation, in a story, in question-answer
form, in a talk. It leads to better assimilation of new words.
Stage II – drilling, its aim is to create or form the stereotypes of
usage of a new word.
Stage III – situational (communicative practice) aimed to
developing or improving the vocabulary subskills in the aspect of
using vocabulary in the speech.
People can communicate using 400-500 words. An educated
person uses 3000-5000 words to express his ideas in the written and
spoken forms of speech. A person should know more than 3000-
5000 words for reading and listening. Famous writers and poets use
20-25 thousand words in their works.
Many language teaching programmes aspire to teach only about
2000 words. Are the remaining words learnt from a dictionary?
Definitely not. If the meanings have not been supplied by outside
sources, as it were, then where have they been found? The answer
is, of course, that we guess the meanings of the words by hearing
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them used in a certain situation or by reading them in a certain
context and guessing their meaning from the context
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.
In connection with the matter of guessing importance in the
communicative activity (during reading or listening) it is necessary
to discuss some ways to learn words in the context in detail.
Inferring the word meaning from the context allows the student
to infer or guess the meaning from the context or illustrations.
Through the context students obtain a general understanding of an
unfamiliar word if 1) they continue reading, if students know
something about the content of reading or listening materials from
their knowledge of the first language reading; 2) students know how
the meaning of the words they learn refers to parts of reality.
For this purpose teachers need to know how to train students’
subskills. The teacher can use the following techniques (for
efficient readers) suggested by Yang Zhihong
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:
1. Look at the unknown word and decide its part of speech. Is it
a noun, a verb, an adjective, or an adverb?
2. Look at the clause or sentence containing unknown word. If
the unknown word is a noun, what does this noun do, or what is
done to it? And what adjectives describe it? What verb is it near? If
it is a verb, what nouns does it it go with? Is it modified by an
adverb? If it is an adjective, what noun does it go with? If it is an
adverb, what verb is it modifying?
3. Look at the relationship between the clause or sentences
containing the unknown word and other sentences or paragraphs.
Sometimes this relationship will be signaled by conjunctions like
but, because, if, when, or by adverbs like however, as a result. The
possible types of relationship include cause and effect, contrast,
time, exemplification, and summary.
4. Use the knowledge you have gained from steps 1 to 3 to
guess the meaning of the word.
5. Check if your guess is correct.
a) See the part of speech of your guess is the same.
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Lado R., Fries C. Lessons in Vocabulary. - Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1990.
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Yang Zhihong. Learning words. // English Teaching Forum. 2000. V.38, No3. - P. 19.
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b) Replace the unknown word with your guess. Does the
sentence make sense?
c) Break the unknown word into its prefix, root, and suffix, if it
possible. Is the meaning of the prefix and root correspond to your
guess?
Through a range of instructional activities, student can actively
and consciously develop their vocabulary subskills. Meaningful
instruction should of course include the explicit teaching of word
meaning and discussion about words and their prefixes, suffixes,
and roots. But it should also include dictionary exercises, word
family activities, semantic mapping, semantic feature analysis, word
associations, synonym and antonym activities, cognate awareness
exercises, practice with lexical sets, classification activities.
Although classroom instruction of these types of vocabulary
work cannot account for all the words students need to learn to
assimilate vocabulary via direct teaching.
The process of vocabulary acquisition has a certain laws and
rules. The first encounter with the word is sometimes more
important than its frequency in exercises. That is why it is essential
to «prime the word», i.e. to prepare the learners for the encounter
with the new word through activation of prior knowledge and
creating the necessity of using the word. Development of
vocabulary in mind depends on the complexity of the concepts that
are expressed with the help of words, because words with a concrete
meaning are acquired easier and sooner than abstract ones. Learners
acquire separate meanings of a word. First they acquire one
component of meaning and then another. Basic terms (e.g. potato)
are learned before superordinate words (vegetables). The storage of
words in memory depends on the depth of meaning processing. The
deeper learners get the meaning of the words in examples and
associations, the stronger memory traces will be. Receptive skills
come before productive skills and the learners find it easier first to
understand a word and then to use it. The knowledge of a
vocabulary item comes before the knowledge of a vocabulary
collocation, i.e. the learners first acquire words and then learn how
to combine them in collocations. Words are best remembered in
their situational context (combination with other words) yet
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situational context can limit the potential use of the words to
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