Tashkent state pedagogical university named after б \июолnizami foreign languages faculty department of Practical Course of English Language

I.2 The Development of effective strategies for teaching vocabulary

In order to learn learners use a range of strategies. By vocabulary learning strategies We mean the actions that learners take to help themselves understand and remember vocabulary. Shmitt makes a useful distinction between “discovery” strategies, such as looking up a new word in a dictionary or guessing it from its context, and “consolidation” strategies, such as learning a list of words by heart or asking someone to test you . Some of strategies can be called cognitive : they are direct mental operations which are concerned with working on new words in order to understand, categorize, and store them in the mental lexicon . Examples are making associations, learning words in groups, and exploring range of meaning . Another cognitive strategy reported by learners is that of using keywords . A keyword is a word chosen from the first language which sounds like the new word in the second language, and where it is possible to make some kind of association between the two. For example , the first syllable of the Swedish word trasko (“clog”) is similar to the English word “tread” , so one can imagine a clog-shod foot treading heavily across the floor.

Other cognitive strategies can be observed when learners first encounter an unfamiliar word and engage in lexical inferencing in order to try to establish its meaning . Take the word “agreeable”, for example, in the following text:

When the English discovered that the Gaelic speakers of the Scottish Highlands were producing a most agreeable beverage, they asked what it was called . The Scots replied with their Gaelic name for it , is gebeathe , which means “water of life “ in Gaelic . This name was taken into English as whiskybae and quickly shortened to whisky .

A learner might deduce from the syntactic structure that the word is an adjective located before a noun , might divide the word into its parts , realizing that “-able” is a common suffix for an adjective , might read on for evidence in the context of the text that the meaning is positive , and might look for a similar word in his or her first language . In this way , contextual cues which relate to the reader’s knowledge of alcoholic beverage are used for inferencing meaning . So ,too , are the intralingual cues provided by a knowledge of the morphology of English . And , thirdly , any interlingual cues from similarity to words in the learner’s first language can be used to assist the inferencing strategy.