Lecture 5 Teaching vocabulary

1. Lexical competence and its composition

2. Stages of teaching vocabulary. Ways of presenting vocabulary.

3. Activities for practicing vocabulary

1. Lexical competence and its composition

Lexical competence embraces lexical knowledge, vocabulary skills and lexical awareness (cf. grammar competence). The question arises: how many words should learners know and what it means to know a word.

Different languages include different number of words: Ukrainian dictionary by Boris Grinchenko – about 70 thousand words, modern Ukrainian dictionary – 135 thousand, Shevchenko’s dictionary – 20.5 thousand. Modern English dictionary – 980 thousand words, W. Churchill – 60 thousand, Shakespeare - about 20 thousand. To take part in the elementary talk one needs about 300 vocabulary units (the include words, set expressions and clichés), to understand any general (non-special) text 8000 vocabulary units are needed. So lexical minimum should be selected – active and passive. Who selects it? Scholars, methodologists, those people who compile curricula and write course-books. The criteria for selecting vocabulary minimum are as follows:

• Combinability (ability to collocate with other words, preference is given to units of broad combinability);

• Semantic value (ability to express important notions in the spheres of communication prescribed by the curriculum);

• Stylistic neutrality (unlimited usage)

• Frequency of use (according to the Birmingham Corpus the first 15 most frequent words in English are: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, I, it, was, is, he, for, you, on)

• Polysemy ( head, leg, body)

• Ability to form new words and to perform several syntactic functions (thus more nouns than adverbs etc)

Active and passive vocabulary taken together form learners’ real vocabulary, besides there exist potential vocabulary – lexical units whose meaning a learner can guess. Here we refer:

• International words similar in form and in meaning to lexical units in the mother tongue;

• Derivatives and compound words made up of familiar elements;

• Words formed by conversion;

• Some indirect meanings of familiar words;

• Words whose meaning can be inferred from the context.

What does it mean to know a word?

To know a word in a target language as well as the native speaker knows it, means the ability to:

1. Recognise it in its spoken and written form;

2. Recall it at will;

3. Relate it to an appropriate object or concept;

4. Use it in the appropriate grammatical form;

5. In speech, pronounce it in the recognisable way;

6. In writing spell it correctly;

7. Use it in the correct collocation (with the words it correctly goes with);

8. Use it at the appropriate level of formality;

9. Be aware of its connotations and associations.

So components of knowing a word may be put under the three categories: meaning, form and distribution.

Meaning: denotation; connotation; polysemy (main and other meanings) and semantic relations – lexical systems (homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponyms and superordinates)

Form: phonology, spelling, morphological composition

Distribution: collocation, register (formal – informal, style

Acquisition of vocabulary cannot happen just mechanically (learning a dictionary is absurd). We should help learners build certain associations. Besides, words are stored in our minds in certain webs, groups. Each mental lexicon is unique since it incorporates the person’s life experience, needs, interests etc. So teachers should take it into consideration and find some individual ways for different learners. Acquisition of vocabulary is a social process: we do it in communication and retention of words and their recall depend on their active use in communication.