Teaching vocabulary

To know a lang means to master its structure and words. Thus, vocabulary is one of the aspects of the lang to be taught at school. The problem is what words and idioms pupils should retain. Principles of selecting voc-ry. The words should be:

· Frequently used in the lang

· Easily combined

· Unlimited from the point of view of style

· Included in the topic discussed

· Valuable from the point of view of word-building

Word frequency is an example of purely linguistic approach to word selection. It is claimed to be the soundest criterion because it is completely objective. It is derived by counting the number of occurrences of words in texts.

Steps of learning voc-ry

1. The teacher gets his students to listen to the word in a authentic-sounding dialogues.

2. Teacher gives time to study what the meaning is

3. Discussion of the meaning

4. Teacher provides phonological model

5. Teacher provides use of the word in a natural way

6. Students repeat

Teaching phonetics.First of all, the teacher’s pronunciation must be ideal, because the students hear it all the time and adopt his/her style. The teacher should present to the class authentic speech recorded on tape

(e.g. native speakers’ monologues, discussions, interviews). Besides, the teacher should adopt an individual approach to each student and try to correct individual pronunciation mistakes by giving homework exercises (e.g. tongue-twisters).

Productive and non-productive ways of formation

Word-formation is the process of creating new words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns. Two types of word-formation may be distinguished: word-derivation and word-composition (compounding).

Word-derivation implies only one derivational base and one derivational affix (prefix, suffix). The basic ways of forming words in word-derivation are affixation and conversion.

Word composition implies two or more root morphemes (forget-me-not, looking-glass, water-fall).

Minor ways of word-formation are:

–shortening (graphical and lexical: Street-St., labortaory-lab.),

–sound-and stress-interchange (full — to fill, food — to feed, blood — to bleed, bath — to bathe, ´absent a — to ab´sent)

–postpositions (look after, passer-by)

–clipping (radarman)

–blending (polutician (from pollute and politician), smog (from smoke and fog), ballute (from baloon and parachute), foolosopher echoing philosopher).

Besides, distinction should be made between productive and non-productive ways of word-formation. Those ways that are used in present-day English for the creation of new words are called productive. Other ways which cannot now produce words are called non-productive.

The agent suffix -er is to be qualified both as a productive and as an active suffix. The adjective suffix -fulis described as a productive but not as an active one, for there are hundreds of adjectives with this suffix (e.g. beautiful, hopeful, useful,etc.), but no new words seem to be built with its help.

Non-prod. suffixes are –th, -hood, -en, -ly, -some, -ous.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 826