Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Vocabulary
At first sight, vocabulary does not seem to be a problem for
many advanced foreign learners. In fact, their vocabulary
range is often greater than that of many native speakers. The
deficiencies lie, however, in two main areas. First, there is the
gap mentioned above under Register. The problem is not
simply one of teaching ‘kid’ instead of ‘child’, but of speaking
natural rather than stilted English. Two ways amongst many
in which this can be rapidly improved are by instilling a

---

Teaching English to Adults
198
mastery of the use of the phrasal verb and by teaching a
selective use of idiom. Very few students come to English
with any familiarity acquired from their mother tongue with
forms analogous to the phrasal verb. The need at an
advanced level is to familiarise them with the problem,
demonstrate current English usage, give copious practice and
insist on the students’ regular production of these forms. An
allied problem is the use of idioms—not simply the use of the
colourful phrase such as ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, but the
teacher must develop a sensitivity to the less obtrusive yet
very vital idiomatic restrictions on tense usage of many
expressions, and to the difficulties of their semantic
interpretation.
The second problem is the advanced student’s lack of
awareness of the connotations (that is, the associations, the
allusive qualities) of the vocabulary they use. The strict
meaning (the denotation) is usually known, but the ‘feel’ the
word carries to a native speaker is usually not. Occasionally
dictionaries help by attaching labels such as ‘pejorative’ to
words like frog or wog; but there is not much more formal
help. As in the case of register in the previous section, the
teacher can only hope to begin to put things right over a long
period of time. Similar teaching procedures can be adopted
as to those outlined above, but in the last analysis the
advanced student must develop his own associative semantic
networks in English—nearly always different, if only subtly
so, from those in his mother tongue—by prolonged repeated
exposure to words in a variety of illustrative contexts. This is
best done through extensive reading, and the building up of a
set of index cards of words and phrases with illustrative
examples of new connotations and associations. Only in this
way will his intuitions approximate closely enough to those
of native speakers, and only in this way will he appreciate the
nuances of English and be able to respond equally sensitively.