Vocabulary teaching techniques

There are numerous techniques concerning vocabulary presentation. Gairns and Redman (1986) suggest the following options for vocabulary presentation.

1. visual techniques
2. verbal techniques
3. dictionaries

Visual techniques for the presentation of new lexical items pertain to visual memory, which is considered helpful especially with vocabulary retention. Learners can remember the presented material far more effectively if it has been presented by means of visual aids. They help students associate presented material in a meaningful way and incorporate it into their existing system of language.

Teachers can benefit from the use of:

1. flashcards,
2. photographs and pictures, blackboard drawings
3. word pictures
4. information on culture
5. labelling pictures / objects
6. mime and gesture
7. action
8. incongruous visuals

However, before I start to present a new vocabulary, it is useful to implement some recommendations:

1. Spoken language precedes written mode. When our students can pronounce words, we can introduce their written form. This can prevent them from trying to pronounce English words as if they were written in their own language.

2. Try to present new words in context.

3. Revision is essential. We can blend new words into later practice.

Teacher can choose from several ways of presenting vocabulary and making clear its meaning. He can use these separately or in combination with each other. The way to present the meaning of many abstract words is through the creation of a context or a situation that is helpful when deducing the meaning of a word. When we want to present person’s feature as “innocent” it is very useful to create a character who is innocent (e.g. a figure taken from the history). If it is necessary we can accompany example by mime or drawing. Ur, in this connection, offers the following ways of presenting the meaning of new vocabulary items:

• concise definition (taken from dictionary, or invented by the teacher him/herself)
• detailed description (appearance, qualities)
• examples (hyponyms)
• illustration (picture, object)
• demonstration (acting, mime)
• context (story or sentence in which the item occurs)
• synonyms
• opposites (antonyms)
• translation
• associated ideas, collocations

Card№22

1.a) Syntagmatic connection of Words. Actual Division of the Sentence.

Syntagmatic relations are immediate linear relations between units in a segmental sequence. The combination of two words or word-groups one of which is modified by the other forms a unit which is reffered to as a syntactic ”syntagma”.

There are four main types of notional syntagmas: predicative (the combination of a subject and a predicate), objective (-/- a verb and its object), attributive (a noun and attribute), adverbial (a modified notional word, such as a verb, adjective, or adverb, with its adverbial modifier). The other type of relations, opposed to syntagmatic and called “paradigmatic”, are such as exist between elements of the system outside the strings where they co-occur. Unlike syntagmatic relations, paradigmatic relations cannot be directly observed in utterances, that is why they are reffered to as relations “in absentia”.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1547