Тиллар ўҚитиш методикаси ва таълим технологиялари

LECTURE 15. TEACHING VOCABULARY TO B1 LEVEL LEARNERS.
Lecture outline:
1. Working with vocabulary: Denotation and polysemy
2. Connotation and Sociocultural context
3. What a student may need to know about an item
4. Ways to present vocabulary
5. Vocabulary exercises.
Vocabulary is crucial for getting meaning from a written or oral text. Without knowledge of key vocabulary in a text, a learner may have serious trouble understanding the message.
Teaching the meaning of individual words, however, will not ensure that learners can read a text with understanding. 'Words enter into meaningful relations with other words around them…' (Sinclair 1996:76).
To understand a text, learners need to know words, and 'knowing a word involves knowing: its spoken and written contexts of use, its patterns with words of related meaning…' (Carter, 2001:43). When teaching vocabulary it is then necessary to consider aspects like denotation, polysemy, connotation and sociocultural aspects when teaching a second or foreign language so that learners are able to get meaning from texts.
• Denotation and polysemy
• Connotation
• Sociocultural context
Denotation and polysemy
'The meaning of a word is primarily what it refers to in the real world, its denotation.'(Ur 1997:61) For example, the denotation of the word cat is an animal with soft fur, and whiskers. Nevertheless, words can have many different meanings; in fact, one word in English often has more than one denotation. This phenomenon is called polysemy. The word issue, for instance, refers to a subject that people discuss or argue about, but it also refers to a magazine that is published at a particular time. To solve this problem of polysemy, students need to see and practise words in context, since it is the context that allows them to understand the meaning of a word. Felicity O'Dell (1997) suggests the following activities to deal with polysemy:

• 
  finding one word to fit all the gaps in a set of sentences which illustrate a range of meanings of a polysemous word
  

- finding a word that fits two synonyms or definitions
- explaining puns in newspaper headlines
- explaining jokes
- matching two halves of jokes
- choosing which meaning fits a particular context
-ordering meanings in a dictionary extract in terms of usefulness/interest.
Connotation
Connotation, on the other hand, refers to 'the associations, or positive or negative feelings it evokes, which may or may not be indicated in a dictionary definition.' (Ur: 1997:61). This means that words can suggest different things depending on the context they occur in. A learner who fails to understand the connotation of a word will probably fail to get the message of the text.

To handle connotation O'Dell (1997) suggests the following exercises:

• asking students to give their own connotations for particular words
• classifying words with a positive, neutral or pejorative association
• finding words in a text that show attitude
• explaining straight meanings, unusual headlines, metaphors, puns
• discussing words in a text with regard to their connotations
• adding words to a text
• changing the attitude conveyed in a text.