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LangLit 
An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal
 
 
Vol. 1 Issue - 1
 
 
76
 
 
 
Aug, 2014 
b)
recall it at will; 
c)
relate it to an appropriate object or concept; 
d)
use it in the appropriate grammatical form; 
e)
spell and pronounce it correctly; 
f)
use it in correct collocations; 
g)
use it at the appropriate level of formality. 
It is the role of the teacher to teach the students all these abilities. 
Teaching activities in specialist vocabulary development 
In order to decide whether a word or phrase of colloquial English should be taught, 
EMP teachers should consider whether the word or phrase is likely to be useful to the 
students and whether it is likely to be stored in their long-term memory. When teaching 
medical vocabulary these problems are not so important since all medical words and 
expressions that students encounter in medical texts may prove to be useful in their current or 
target situations, and they should be familiarized with them. However, teachers should 
distinguish between vocabulary needed for comprehension and that needed for production. In 
comprehension the development of the strategies allowing to deduce the meaning of words 
form context is the most important way of learning new words. For production of words, the 
vital methods involve making an association network (connecting the word to other words 
which learners associate with it) by drawing diagrams and using mnemonic devices (devising 
an image that connects the pronunciation or spelling of a L2 word with the meaning of a L1 
word) (Thornbury, 2002). For better remembering of the word cognitive processing is more 
effective than mechanical learning – the more decisions the learner makes about a word and 
the more cognitively demanding these decisions are, the better the word is remembered 
(Miller, 2001).
Presentation of the unfamiliar vocabulary means the pre-planned lesson stages in 
which learners are taught pre-selected vocabulary items (Thornbury, 2002). However, 
incidental vocabulary teaching can occur in other parts of the lesson when the unfamiliar 
vocabulary is used in a text, a discussion, a role-play, or problem-solving tasks. Specialist 
vocabulary should be presented in context, the best context seems to be texts related to the 
subject field. Words in context give students the chance to see their environment, such as 
their associated collocations or grammatical structures. To enhance noticing of the presented 
words in the text, they can be made noticeable by highlighting or underlining them. When 
introducing the meaning of new words a variety of teaching techniques can be used, such as: 
translation, providing pictures, real things, definitions, semantic sets (synonyms, antonyms, 
subordinate terms), situational sets related to the topic, and metaphor sets (comparisons). In 
the following part of this section we would like to share our experience in the teaching of 
specialist (medical) vocabulary in EMP courses conducted by us in the medical university. 
The aim of the presented exercises is to help the students understand and consolidate the 
words and commit them to long-term memory. 
The quickest and easiest technique of presenting the meaning of words is translation 
into the native language. It is helpful for both the teacher and the students but it may deprive 
the students of understanding of the associations between the words. Therefore, in some 
cases new vocabulary should not be treated as isolated items, but should be translated and 
practiced as lexical chunks or lexical phrases (multi-word conventionalized units). For 
example, expressions “The patient presented with the symptoms of ...”, and “The patient 
developed ...” may sound unnatural and ungrammatical to Polish students when translated 
word by word into the Polish language, but in fact they are normal expressions used in 

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