Vocabulary: Advanced Teaching Methodology

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY

UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

Advanced Teaching Methodology

TESOL Program

Instructor: Nguyen Thu Huong, Ph.D.

Class: 2016-B

Name: Doan Thi Sam

FINAL PAPER

Vocabulary is a crucial part of language that it is unattainable for a language system to achieve without them. Language structure is considered “the skeleton of the language,” it agreed that vocabulary is “the vital organs and flesh” (Harmer, 1991). So learning a language is to learn its vocabulary first. The acquisition of vocabulary is the central task for second language acquisition, and the language learners’ vocabulary competence takes a prestigious effect

Because of their relative transparency in meaning, lexical phrases offer L2 learners little difficulty in terms of comprehension. However, lexical phrases are more problematic when they are used in productive skills, such as speaking and writing, than in receptive skills, such as speaking and reading. Even if learners can manage to guess the meanings of lexical phrases in receptive processes, they might not be able to use them properly in reproducing the language. Thus, producing lexical phrases requires pedagogical treatment. Teaching of lexical phrases in English foreign language classes have not got enough attention; as a result, students learning English as a foreign language are weak in lexical phrases use. Rather than teaching vocabulary as single lexical items which causes a lexical incompetence on the part of learners, students must be made aware of the necessity of acquiring lexical phrases. Up till now, although many empirical researches focus on adopting the lexical phrases to the English speaking teaching, the researches on the role of lexical phrases in non-English majors’ speaking have not been concerned. Besides, for many studies, the teaching strategies are either too general or too difficult to meet the needs of non-English majors. So this paper attempts to fill this gap by exploring the effectiveness

Lexical phrases play an important role in language production. Lexical phrases are stored as prefabricated wholes, they can be easily retrieved. When lexical phrases are used there is no need composing sentences through word selection and grammatical sequencing, which accounts for lexical phrases’ function of lightening the load of language processing. When language learners use formulaic language units and sentence stems, fluency and accuracy will be achieved. Consequently, the basis of fluency and accuracy is to retrieve and blend lexical phrases. One has to command a large number of lexical phrases so as to reach the native-like fluency and accuracy. From the above analysis, it can be concluded that an improvement in teaching lexical phrases needs three requirements at least. The first one is raising students’ awareness of lexical phrases, the second one is contextualized teaching is preferred in order to develop students’ ability to memorize and use lexical