The ministry of higher and secondary specialised education of uzbekistan the uzbek state world languages university the english teaching methodology department

Translation

• translation by means of giving an equivalent

  
  

• translation-interpretation

  
  

• comparing a foreign word with that of the native language

  
  

The choice of a way of conveying the meaning of a word depends on the following factors:

1) whether the word belongs to the active (productive) (productive) or passive (receptive) “receptive” minimum vocabulary;
2) on the stage of learning: at the junior level – visual techniques, speech-patterns, translation; at the intermediate level – synonyms, antonyms, word-building analysis; at the senior level - context, definitions;
3) on the level of the language preparation of the class;
4) on the qualitative characteristics of a word.
How to work at a new word? - There are 2 ways: at an isolated word, in a context. How to work at an isolated word:
- when you deal with proper names, geographical names;
- sometimes you can give some words to develop the language guessing abilities (the first word is given in a context, the rest – in isolation: a runner – in a context; a jumper – will be easily guessed);
- when teaching the pupils to work with a dictionary.
Work at a new word in a context is more widely used: in a phrase, in a situation, in a story, in question-answer form, in a talk, in a story with elements of a talk. It leads to better assimilation of new words.
Stage II – drilling. Aim: to create/form the stereotypes of usage of a new word.
Stage III – situational (communicative practice). Aim – improvement of the vocabulary skills and developing of the pupils’ skills of using the vocabulary independently.
There is another point which is called inferencing (or guessing) procedures. Many language teaching programmes aspire to teach only about 2000 words. Are the remaining words learnt from a dictionary? Almost certainly not. If the meanings have not been supplied by outside sources, as it were, then where have they been found? The answer is, of course, that we guess the meanings of the words by hearing them used in a certain situation or by reading them in a certain context and guessing their meaning from the context⁸.
Now we shall look through all these stages in details. When we speak about the lexical meaning it should be apprehend as the material meaning of a word. This is a meaning which gives the concept of a word. By the lexical meaning the word expresses the basic properties of the thing the word denotes. The lexical meaning of a word falls into two: the denotational meaning and the connotational meaning. Denotational meaning makes communication possible because words denote things, concepts, they name them. Ex. the denotational meaning of the word «table» is a piece of furniture consisting of a flat top with four supports (called legs). The connotational meaning is a meaning which has a stylistic shade. It serves to express all sorts of emotions, expressiveness. Connotation may be shortly defined as emotional and evaluative component of the lexical meaning. For example, the notion of “white” can be expressed by different words: “bianco, white, weiB, blanc, safed” in Spanish, English, German, French and Persian. One can see that the expressed notion is one and words are several. Every word can express several meanings if it is not a term, for instance: whitepaper, to whiten up, etc. Meaning is studied in linguistics and notion in psychology. Meaning of the word is linguistic term, it is given in dictionaries.
Four structural sides of the word-phonemes (in phonetics), structure (in lexicology) and grammar (in morphology) are studied in linguistics. Nowadays Indo-European languages consist of more than half million words. People can communicate in a language using 400-500 words. An educated person uses 3000-5000 words to express his ideas in writing and speaking. A person should know more than 3000-5000 words for reading and listening. Famous writers and poets use 20-25 thousand words in their works. Words are classified into groups according to some categories: lexico-grammatical (word combination), ways of word formation (simple, compound), groups of theme and terms and etc.
The world is formed as the symbols of things and so are words in our mind. The word remembers us the symbol of object and circumstance as the second signal system, for instance: when you hear or read the word “bread” you can easily imagine “food”. The relationship between notions should be taken into consideration while teaching vocabulary. Firstly, in other words, there are narrow and wide spread notions, for example: woman, man – person; daughter, son-child. Secondly, coinciding- two notions are different in their meanings: to visit- to come; thirdly, partly coinciding-one notion can partly cover the another one: scientist-methodist, pedagogue-musician; fourthly, words which do not coincide with each other, for example: pen-twighlight, algorithm-holiday.
You can see the differences in the Table 9.