The word'dog, for example, as understoodby most British people, has positive connotations of friendship and loyalty whereas the equivalent in Arabic, as understood by most people in Arabcountries has negative associations of dirt and inferiority.Ī more subtle aspect of meaning that often needs to be taught is whether aparticular item is the appropriate one to use in a certain context or not. For example, dog denotes a kind of animal more specifically, a common, domestic carnivorous mammal and both dank and moist mean slightly wet.Ī less obvious component of the meaning of an item is its connotation: theassociations, or positive or negative feelings it evokes, which may or may not beindicated in a dictionary definition. The meaning of a word is primarily what it refers to in the real world, its denotation this is often the sort of definition that is given in a dictionary. Aspects of meaning (1): denotation, connotation, appropriateness When introducing words like decision and conclusion, for example, we may note that you take or make the one, but usually come to the other similarly, you throw a ball but toss a coin you may talk about someone being dead tired but it sounds odd to say "'dead fatigued.Collocations are also often noted in dictionaries, either by providing the whole collocation under one of the head-words, or by a note in parenthesis.Ĥ. So this is another piece of information about a new item which it may be worth teaching. The collocations typical of particular items are another factor that makes a particular combination sound 'right' or 'wrong' in a given context. We may present verbs such as want and enjoy together with the verb form that follows them (want to, enjoy -ing), oradjectives or verbs together with their following prepositions (responsible for, remind someone of}. Similarly, when teaching a noun, we' may wish to present its plural form, if irregular (mouse, mice], or draw learners' attention to the fact that it has no plural at all (advice, information}. When teaching a new verb, for example, we might give also its past form, if this is irregular (think, thought), and we might note if it is transitive or intransitive. An item may have an unpredictable change of form in certain grammatical contexts or may have some idiosyncratic! The grammar of a new item will need to be taught if this is not obviously covered by general grammatical rules. In teaching, we need to make sure that both these aspects areaccurately presented and learned. ![]() These are fairly obvious characteristics, and one or the other will be perceived by the learner when encountering the item for the first time. ![]() The learner has to know what a word sounds like (its pronunciation) and what it looks like (its spelling). A useful convention is to cover all such cases by talking about vocabulary 'items' rather than 'words'. There are also multi-word idioms such as call it a day, where the meaning of the phrase cannot be deduced from an analysis of the component words. However, a new item of vocabulary may be more than a single word: for example, post office and mother-in-law, which are made up of two or three words but express a single idea. Vocabulary can be defined, roughly, as the words we teach in the foreign language. ![]() WHAT IS VOCABULARY AND WHAT NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT?Īutor: Prof.
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