Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
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Vocabulary
At first sight, vocabulary does not seem to be a problem for many advanced foreign learners. In fact, their vocabulary range is often greater than that of many native speakers. The deficiencies lie, however, in two main areas. First, there is the gap mentioned above under Register. The problem is not simply one of teaching ‘kid’ instead of ‘child’, but of speaking natural rather than stilted English. Two ways amongst many in which this can be rapidly improved are by instilling a Teaching English to Adults 198 mastery of the use of the phrasal verb and by teaching a selective use of idiom. Very few students come to English with any familiarity acquired from their mother tongue with forms analogous to the phrasal verb. The need at an advanced level is to familiarise them with the problem, demonstrate current English usage, give copious practice and insist on the students’ regular production of these forms. An allied problem is the use of idioms—not simply the use of the colourful phrase such as ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, but the teacher must develop a sensitivity to the less obtrusive yet very vital idiomatic restrictions on tense usage of many expressions, and to the difficulties of their semantic interpretation. The second problem is the advanced student’s lack of awareness of the connotations (that is, the associations, the allusive qualities) of the vocabulary they use. The strict meaning (the denotation) is usually known, but the ‘feel’ the word carries to a native speaker is usually not. Occasionally dictionaries help by attaching labels such as ‘pejorative’ to words like frog or wog; but there is not much more formal help. As in the case of register in the previous section, the teacher can only hope to begin to put things right over a long period of time. Similar teaching procedures can be adopted as to those outlined above, but in the last analysis the advanced student must develop his own associative semantic networks in English—nearly always different, if only subtly so, from those in his mother tongue—by prolonged repeated exposure to words in a variety of illustrative contexts. This is best done through extensive reading, and the building up of a set of index cards of words and phrases with illustrative examples of new connotations and associations. Only in this way will his intuitions approximate closely enough to those of native speakers, and only in this way will he appreciate the nuances of English and be able to respond equally sensitively. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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