Essay On Importance Of Teaching Vocabulary

2.3. Importance of learning and teaching vocabulary and academic word lists in EAP

Students who will follow an academic syllabus in English need to gain a wide range of academic skills like reading in a special scientific or academic field, writing academic thesis and discussing or presenting their own research. With its importance, academic vocabulary should be the very first thing taught by ESP teachers because this type of vocabulary, even though it is sometimes used in casual contexts, also has a higher frequency of occurrence in scientific and scholar texts.

Considering the difficulty of the task of vocabulary learning, it is an unreasonable expectation for the teacher to entirely teach all nuances of vocabulary and a whole set of a wordlist to learners. Instead, students can be encouraged to learn how to keep on collecting vocabulary on their own after developing a basic level of vocabulary. Mikio Brooks (2008) cites Gairns and Redman, who assert that “individual learning of vocabulary not only gives more responsibility toward a student’s own learning, but can also help focus on individual learner needs” (164). Since individual

Word consciousness includes awareness of word structure, along with an understanding of word components and word order. Students need to become familiar with how written language differs from casual conversation by drawing their attention to the distinctive schemes of written language such as synthesis and complex sentence structures, constructions within sentences, how punctuation influences marking phrasing, and paragraph structure. Students experience benefits from hearing language that links the vocabulary and sentence structures in advanced written English. Literate written English uses words and grammatical structures in new ways to most of students, and reading qualified literature gets the students used to multiple genres of written English. (Sedita, 2005: