92-pages-GUIDELINES-FOR-SECONDARY-SCHOOLS-All-Streams-and-Sections

TEACHING VOCABULARY
A rationale
The plea for more focus on vocabulary building in language education has stemmed from the results of research
conducted on successful people not only in the field of education, but also from research in other socio-economic
and cultural sectors. Within the standards-based approach adhered to, the teaching of vocabulary for an EFL
learner is given priority on the following grounds:
• There is a high correlation between learners’ lexicons and measures of intelligence and reading
comprehension.
• There is also a correlation between the amount of vocabulary and one’s predisposition for being a good
communicator or a leader.
• Vocabulary is also so important because ideas and shades of meaning are very often formulated in
words, and words are a prerequisite tool for independence.
• Words are also labels for what we know or feel, and as our store of words grows, our knowledge of the
world grows as well.
• If a person’s word power is limited, she is necessarily a limited thinker, since she can neither receive
ideas nor communicate with others except within the confines of her inadequate vocabulary.
• Speakers can better understand grammatically incorrect utterances with accurate vocabulary than those
with accurate grammar and inaccurate vocabulary. In other words, without accurate syntax, meaning
might be hindered for foreign language speakers, but without vocabulary, meaning is impossible.
Vocabulary knowledge
The teaching of vocabulary is at the forefront of this approach. Teachers need to account for the various issues
related to vocabulary and vocabulary knowledge. They also need to be aware that knowing a lexical item is a
long and complex process which involves at least the following:
1. knowledge of the frequency of the word in speech and writing.
2. knowledge of its morphology (i.e. knowing how the word is formed (e.g. affixation & word families)).
3. knowledge of its semantics (i.e. knowing its various ranges of meaning; denotations, connotations,
obsolete and avant-garde words, etc).
4. knowledge of its boundries that separate it from other words of related meanings (e.g. house, address,
dwelling, mansion, bungalow, etc).
5. knowledge of polysemy (e.g. words can have more than one meaning).
6. knowledge of its semantic and syntactic collocation(i.e. knowing that some words fit into only some
lexical or grammatical sets (e.g. “exam” collocates with “take”, “pass”, “mock”, etc).
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التوجيهات التربوية وبرامج تدريس مادة اللغة الإنجليزية س ت ث ت 2007