Article · August 014 citations reads 12,470 author

LangLit 
An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal
 
 
Vol. 1 Issue - 1
 
 
84
 
 
 
Aug, 2014 
doctor’s questions adjusted to the given answers). 
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Give the patient a proper medical advice (the situation is described, some medical 
words are given and the student’s task is to recommend a proper therapy and explain 
its character). 
These activities involve many processes that promote vocabulary retention in long-
term memory. 
Regardless the number of words students have acquired, there are always unfamiliar 
words in the texts they read or listen to. Guessing the meaning of an unknown word from 
context is one of the most useful skills for students. Teachers should help their students to 
acquire this skill. DeCarrico (2001) recommends several steps in guessing the meaning from 
context: 1) deciding the part of speech of the unknown word (a noun, verb or adjective); 
2) looking at the word’s immediate collocates (an article may suggest that it is a countable 
noun; an object may suggest that it is a transitive verb); 3) looking at the wider context (the 
surrounding clauses and sentences, especially beginning with conjunctions, such as but, 
when, because of, however, as a result) which helps in deducing the type of rhetorical 
relationship between the sentences and clauses; 4) breaking the unknown word into its prefix, 
root and suffix, where possible; 5) reading the text on to check if the guess is correct; 6) 
consulting a dictionary when all these fail. 
Discussion and conclusion 
The vocabulary lesson (or part of the lesson) still has a prominent place in every kind 
of syllabus. The importance of vocabulary learning was expressed by Wilkins (1976) in his 
statement: “Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be 
conveyed”. In ESP or EAP the learning of specialist vocabulary by the students of a 
particular discipline has a crucial role in their L2 language acquisition. The participants of 
courses of this type are the students who not only have already achieved some level of 
proficiency in the English language use, but also they possess some, sometimes quite 
advanced, knowledge of their content subject. They are highly motivated to increase 
specialist vocabulary knowledge as they are aware of its beneficial role for their professional 
career. Therefore, teaching specialist vocabulary effectively is one of the main roles of the 
ESP/EAP teacher. 
Presenting new words is only the first step in learning them. To consolidate them, that 
is, to ensure their transfer to long-term memory, the students should have ample 
opportunities to use new words in a variety of exercises and activities. All the above 
mentioned types of vocabulary exercises have been designed by the authors of this paper and 
presented to use either in the published textbooks (e.g., Donesch-Jezo, 2002), or in the 
teaching materials compiled by them and provided to students in the form of worksheets. We 
strongly advise introducing a variety of lexical tasks to break the classroom routine and to 
introduce each time some elements of novelty, which will increase the students’ interest and 
motivation. The most popular exercises with the medical students in our courses are 
matching activities, crosswords and analyzing concordance lines of specialist corpora. The 
exercises should be performed in pairs – frequently a word that is unknown to one student is 
known by the other. The teacher’s role is to supervise the students’ performance and provide 
a feedback in the form of explanation or advice. All exercises should not be too long, 
otherwise students may lose interest in them. Students profit most from performing a variety 
of tasks, that is why they should be introduced interchangeably. In this way the teachers can 
avoid monotony and boredom which might otherwise occur in their lessons. Moreover, the 
greater variety of activities the students perform, the more confident they will be in the use of 

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