ELT: A Lexical Approach
T. Vinoda
As teachers of English all of us are into the business of teaching English. Some of you might have been in this profession for a long and some are relatively new-comers. But all of us know very well that much of the respect we command in society comes from the subject we teach, i.e. English. In today’s world, English is needed for upward mobility and for social and economic success. There is a great demand for English because it has a lot of “surrender value” and the learners want to cash in on that. Aspiring professionals even go to expensive English language institutes for improving their communication skills. English is not only the language of opportunities, but a language of information as well. All modern information in any branch of knowledge—say medicine, computer technology, space technology, biotechnology, bio-informatics, genetic engineering, economics, agriculture, etc.—is readily available in English. To put it briefly, English is “an exploding language” in a world of “exploding information.” Learners know that in orde4r to bring modern knowledge into their lives, English is a must. Ask students of any course at any level, they will tell you their aim is to speak well, write well, read with comprehension and be efficient listeners, and thereby conquer the world. It is this simple legitimate desire of theirs that we are not able to fulfill, even after eight to ten years of continuous English teaching.
We know for sure that not all is well with the education system. But let us see how best we deliver the goods within this system. Over the years, researchers and teachers in the field of language acquisition have come up with several Methods, Approaches and Techniques—some Methods focusing on writing and reading skills and yet others on speaking and listening skills. The goals of teaching generally decided the methodology. We have methods galore now—starting from Grammar-Translation Method, we have Reform Movement of 1880s under the intellectual leadership of linguists like Henry Sweet; the Direct Method at the very end of 19th century; Reading Method/Situational Language Teaching of the ‘20s and ‘30s leading to the concept of Word Lists—Word lists by Michael West, Thorndike and Lorge; the Audio-lingual Method of the ‘50s, under the leadership of Charles Fries, putting vocabulary teaching on the backburner, treating lexical items as the means by which to illustrate grammatical topics rather than as items with communicative value in themselves. Then came the Communicative Approach, and with it the focus shifted from language usage to language use. Unlike Chomsky whose focus was on linguistic competence, Dell Hymes gave greater emphasis to the socio-linguistic and pragmatic factors governing effective language use. Accordingly the focus in language teaching shifted to Communicative Proficiency rather than the Command of Structures. They maintained skill-getting practices should be supported by “skill-using” opportunities in real communication. With it started the era of authentic language materials in the classroom and emergence of notional and functional syllabi. Here too the focus was not on vocabulary but on the appropriate use of communication categories and towards language as Discourse; Krashen’s The Natural Approach methodology emphasizes comprehensible and meaningful input rather than grammatically correct production. It is in this approach that the vocabulary as a bearer of meaning is considered very important to the language acquisition process.
Lexicographical research begun in the 1980s led to COBUILD (The Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) Project. It is an extensive computer analysis based on central corpus of 20 million words, designed to account for actual language use. Work on corpus analysis and computational linguistics has led to a considerable interest in the importance of large chunks of language, variously known as lexical items, lexical phrases, and prefabricated units. These are multiword chunks (as it were, on the other hand, as X would have us believe). The findings revealed that pragmatic competence is determined by a learner’s ability to access and adapt prefabricated ‘chunks’ of language.
The work of Sinclair, Nattinger, DeCarrico, and Lewis established the fact that lexical items are central to language use and should be central to language teaching. Lewis maintains that “language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammer” (Lewis 1993, p.89). Lewis challenges the validity of a grammar-vocabulary dichotomy and emphasizes the language learner’s need to perceive and use patterns of lexis and collocation. So the focus, in a way, shifted from the traditional view of word boundaries to larger phrasal units.
We as non-native speakers of English feel that a good amount of vocabulary—with a minimum of structure—often makes for better reading comprehension and more efficient survival communications than near-perfect structure with an impoverished vocabulary of 100 words or less. The point I would like to make here is that neither impoverished structure nor vocabulary is desirable. Recognition of the significance of emphasis on vocabulary development does not imply the need for vocabulary lists, the memorization of twenty words per week, or isolated attention to individual words away from their natural environment. It does mean learners should develop their own system for improving their reading vocabularies. It implies that they be helped to work out strategies for unlocking the meanings of unknown units of written language. For this students need to be made aware of all the cues that help them develop their vocabularies—cues within themselves, and cues within the language.
Often students claim that their primary problem in acquiring English is the lack of vocabulary. Such students, it generally turns out, have an adequate active vocabulary, also called “productive” vocabulary. Frequency counts indicate that about 2000 words make up 90% of the vocabulary that native speakers use in everyday conversation. Most second language learners of English too would have acquired this much of Basic English by the time they reach +2 level (Intermediate Degree). Yet they feel their vocabulary is inadequate for purposes of reading and listening. Why is it so? The problem is in the category of Passive Vocabulary or Recognition Vocabulary which the language user employs in reading and listening. While a native speaker of English has a vast passive vocabulary the second/foreign learner of English finds it difficult acquiring this vocabulary; hence their problem with reading and listening comprehension skills. The techniques used to teach passive vocabulary are different from those used to increase a student’s active vocabulary. The ability to use a dictionary and a thesaurus and training oneself to guess meanings of words in context are the seminal strategies in learning passive vocabulary. A new word finds reinforcement when student encounters it the second time and the third time and very soon he starts using the word in his speech and writing. Thus it becomes a part and parcel of his active vocabulary. More than any other strategy, extensive reading is the key to building adequate vocabulary. As Marianne Celce-Mercia and Fred Rosenweig put it, “most important, perhaps, is the teacher’s ability to arouse in his students a genuine interest in vocabulary, to develop the skills and the curiosity that will guarantee the growth of every student’s vocabulary far beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the ESL classroom.
The words of a language are more than merely a list of lexical items. The words of a language are a highly complex system of classes of items—interlocking classes as to meaning, form, grammatical function, distribution, etc.
To enabling the student to read himself into knowledge of vocabulary should be the aim of teaching at college level. We do not want the pupil to concentrate on learning facts about words but the skills of appropriate response and use, which can only be practised in context. We want him to learn English, not lexis. For this he has to run the grammatical patterns of the language through his mind at the same time as the collocations. Our course materials at degree level provide ample scope for contextualizing the lexical items.
Generally we are under a false impression that each word has a form side and a meaning side. The form [d>g] has a meaning “a carnivorous animal that is faithful to man.” This one-to-one correspondence between form (signifier) and meaning (signifie) is a myth. The word ‘spring’ has form but it may mean “a water fountain” or “the season spring” or “the metal coil with elasticity.” Here we have one form signifying three different meanings. In contrast we can also find instances where several different forms may denote the same meaning. For example, ‘enquire, question, ask, interrogate, catechize,’ all mean “question.”
Languages differ from one another both in form and meaning categories. The word ‘horse’ was not a part of American English lexis before the Spanish Conquest. The Spaniards introduced the animal “horse” until the same Spanish people brought them from
The point I would like to make here is that when you look at English look at it with fresh eyes; do not look through coloured glasses, tinted with your mother tongue.
All of us are aware that words are the building blocks of communication. To communicate efficiently you need to know the lexical items in a language. How many words do you need to know in English to make conversation with ease? Do all languages in the world have equal number of words in them? No. Yet another relevant question we should ask ourselves is: Do the number of words in a language remain the same in all ages, or change? For instance, way back in 1755, the famous English critic and a Man of Letters, Samuel Johnson brought out the first important English Dictionary. He worked very hard for ten years to compile that dictionary. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary included 48,000 words in it. That means, in 18th century, English language had less than 50,000 words. Go to any modern English dictionary—it lists not less than 500,000 words. In fact the word-count of English now stands at 600,000. That means the English language has posted a 12 fold increase in just 250 years. We are not going to talk about how a language increases its vocabulary in course of time.
Now we should know what exactly is meant by learning a language? Do we have to learn all the words that are there in it? Not really. If that were the case nobody would come forward to learn that language. An average native speaker of English uses 5000 words in his day to day life – just 5000, and conducts life’s transactions efficiently. On the face of it, it looks quite simple, a cake-walk. But it is not; knowing a word means knowing the entire family of that word. What do you mean by learning a word as a family?
I
Let me explain it. Take the word ‘horse’: mare, stallion, foal (male young), filly (female young), colt (neuter young), pony (a small horse breed), palfrey (women ride on it).” If you compare it with Telugu we have only one word for it – gurram (literary use: ashvam/saindhavam). This is not all. We have several compound words in English that have the word ‘horse’ in them:
Horse sense; horsewhip; horse laugh; horseplay; horse power; horse shoe; horse flesh; forse chestnut; horse box; horse-and-buggy [days]; horse fly; horse hair; horse radish; high horse; clothes horse; a dark horse; a willing horse; riding a hobby horse; horse back; horseman/horsewoman; horsemanship; horse racing; horse shit; horse trading.
Now if you want to heave a sigh of relief—thank god! The word ‘horse’ is over! We have mastered it all—then you are wrong—absolutely wrong. Why? Because we have several phrases in English, you can also call them idioms, which include the word ‘horse’ in them. Let’s find out some:
He eats like a horse; works like a horse; [straight] from the horse’s mouth; flogging a dead horse; putting the cart before the horse; you can lead a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink; hold your horses; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth; horse of another colour; back the wrong horse.
Off the cuff I could list these; there might be some more still. Then knowing a word means knowing all the permutations and combinations and configurations in which the word occurs. Does it appear difficult? Difficult somewhat, but not absolutely so. When you go to the dictionary for the meaning of a new word—don’t just look for the meaning of that word alone—let your eye rove above that word as well as below to find out if there are any other expressions using that word.
Do we have such a linguistic phenomenon in Telugu as well? Yes. Let’s find out the semantic field of a Telugu word—‘maata’ “word”:
Maata ichchaanu; maata padadu; maata saagutundi; maataloo vachchadu; oka maata; naa maata vinu; okka maataloo cheppu; aa maata eemaindi; maaku maatalu leevu; maata poovaddu; maatante maate; maa abbaayiki maatalostunnai; maatakaari; maataa muchchata; vaadi maata niilla moota.
II
So the most important way of enriching one’s vocabulary is to familiarize oneself with the words that have the same root in them. Just take the word ‘sense’ and find out how many words you can get out of it by applying derivation technique:
Sense, non-sense, senseless, sensible, sensibly, insensible, insensibly, sensibility, sensitive, insensitive, sensitivity, insensitivity, sentient, insensate, sensation, sensational, sensationalize, sensitize, sensitization, desensitize, desensitization, sensuous, sensuousness, sensual, sensuality, sensualist, sensor, sensory, nonsensical, senses.
This is what is meant by learning the word as a family or a class. Teacher can give a helping hand to his students by providing contexts for these words. This entails a bit of homework on your part. I know you wouldn’t grudge it.
III
The meaning of a word depends on the context in which it is used. There is no such thing as the meaning of a word in isolation. For example, the word ‘fast’ has several meanings depending upon the context in which it is used:
He runs fast. He stands fast. The color is fast. Friday is fast day. He is fast asleep. My watch is five minutes fast. He is leading a fast life.
So the meaning of a word depends upon the context in which it is used; the use to which it is put in a context. If somebody is engaged in laying the table and asks “Where is the jam?” the meaning of “jam” is clear enough as part of the whole situation (strawberry jam/pineapple jam). If, on the other hand, somebody used the same word sitting in a line of cars, it would mean a “traffic jam”. If somebody asks you for ‘saindhavam’ while he is having dinner, you give him salt; you get him horse if he asks for it after he has dinner. So learning a word is to know the various contexts in which it appears. To put it crudely, the student needs to learn a great many new meanings for words that he already has with him.
Just with one word “go” you can express scores of meanings. Think of phrasal verbs.
His mind went blank. She goes about her work silently. I will go long with you in your decision to marry the girl you love. The politicians went back on their promises. The lecture went down well with the public. He went for his victim’s throat. If you are going for Santro go for ‘zingthing’. The gun went off. He went on talking. He went into the matter of fodder scam. I will go over the matter. I will go through the file. He had to go through a hell of a time. He was given the go-ahead to demolish the illegally built structures.
The list is still incomplete, but it does serve to illustrate that mastering the word “go” in its principal uses is a key to mastering the vocabulary of English. Indeed, without it a student would have quite a gap in his vocabulary. Teaching the ESL student the multiple meanings of lexical items (multiword chunks—here phrasal verbs) presents a formidable challenge. The teacher must take care not to introduce too many uses in any one day. To do so would probably lead to confusion and misuse by the students.
So what matters is not how many words you have in your kitty but to what use you put them to. Words are like coins; the greater the use greater the shine. Though English language has 600,000 words, no one uses all those words in his life time—not even the great writers or greatest orators. Winston Churchill who won the Nobel Prize for literature and was also a great speaker and a statesman had 60,000 active vocabulary in use. That is, only 1/10 of the total vocabulary.
V
If knowing the vocabulary is one thing, using it appropriately is another. May be more difficult than you actually it is. All of you are familiar with synonyms—words with similar or identical meanings. You have a feeling that where one word occurs the other also can go there. But that is not the case; not many words are total synonyms; total synonymy is a luxury no language can afford. Take for instance, ‘start’ and ‘begin’.
You can either start a session or begin a session. But you start the car.
Never begin it.
Similarly if you take words like “declare, announce, pronounce” --all having the meaning “to make it known”--and try using them in specific contexts. You will realize the subtle differences in use:
You declare your assets. (never pronounce or announce).
He was pronounced guilty/dead.
He was declared guilty/dead. (never announced guilty/dead)
The arrival time of the train is just announced. (never declared or pronounced)
Though all the three have shared meaning, each one has its place of occurrence. Mutual substitution is not always possible. We say ‘O God! Help me.’ Never aid me.
VI
This brings us to collocations. These are co-occurrence rules.
Leaves stir in the light breeze; flag flutters in the wind; clouds drift across the sky; trees sway back and forth as the gale grew; the car swerved to avoid running over a dog; ---- boats/ships sail, rivers/streams either flow/run through towns; cars and trucks either travel or drive along roads—rumbling thunder, hissing steam/gas, rustle of silks or paper, roar of the water fall/traffic, clatter of metal pans, pattering of rain on the roof, banging doors, crashing, thud, etc.
Don’t we say “eye of the storm/needle, head of the nail/table, foot of the hill/tree, ears of corn, tongues of flame, mouth of a cave, arms of a chair, legs of a table, teeth of a saw, hands of a clock, etc. Try reversing the combinations presented here, and you will come up with unacceptable collocations. “Foot of a tree” is o.k., but not “head of the tree.”
“Old” shares meaning with both “elderly and antique.” We can say “old furniture,” “old gentleman;” try using “antique” and “elderly” here. “Antique furniture,” and “elderly gentleman,” are o.k., but not “antique gentleman” and “elderly furniture.” You take a walk, make a journey, deliver a lecture, make a speech, teach a lesson, take a class, etc. Most second language learners of English are bad at collocations. The teacher can pitch in and help out the student in this area.
VII
In the first languages we generally pick up strong emotional associations within the home. They are built into the learning situation. But a second language is normally learnt in the less passionate atmosphere of the classroom. The result is a lack of emotional involvement in the language and hence great difficulty in seeing any meaning other than plain sense. If ‘obstinate’ is understood to mean no more than ‘determined’—the writer’s attitude of disapproval is missed. Many of the new learning items the students will meet at college level are loaded with suggestions of feeling and implication.
Each language has words that have pejorative sense or ameliorative sense. The words with bad connotation are called snarl words and the other category is labeled purr words. Observe the following:
‘snarl’ words vis-à-vis ‘purr’ words
Pig-headed/obstinate/stubborn (determined/resolute); stingy/miserly/parsimonious (thrifty/economical); wordy/verbose/high-falutin (fluent); skinny (slim); notorious (famous); spendthrift/extravagant (generous); politician (statesman); blunt/curt/abrupt/brusque (frank/direct/open); aggressive/bossy (assertive); pushy (ambitious); naïve/gullible (innocent); eccentric (original).
VIII
Denotative - Connotative
He showed his teeth. (neutral) He bared his teeth (anger)
He relinquished his post (neutral) He abandoned his post (moral blame)
IX
Languages also differ in the range of lexical sets. A language might make subtle distinctions in a semantic field that are not available in other languages. For example
A. boiling/very hot/hot/quite hot/warm/luke warm/tepid/cool/cold/freezing
B. adore/like very much/ like/quite like/not mind/dislike/hate/loathe/can’t stand
C. fabulous, marvelous/very good/good/quite good/ok, average/not very good/mediocre/bad/awful/dreadful.
X
The Basic English Vocabulary items that the ESL students are taught at the primary and secondary school level are mostly of general nature and are most frequently used words. When they come to college level they keep encountering words which generally apply to narrower contexts than the known words.
In addition to ‘walk’ which they already know, they meet ‘limp,’ ‘hobble,’ ‘stroll,’ ‘saunter,’ ‘march,’ ‘stride.’
In addition to ‘pull,’ they may find ‘tug, jerk, twitch, haul, tow,’ etc.
In addition to ‘box,’ they will find ‘chest, case, carton,’ etc.
In addition to ‘swim,’ there are the words: ‘wade, splash, dive, squelch,’ etc.
It is important that pupils should not be allowed to assume that such words are synonymous. Some general explanation on the part of the teacher is required, reinforced by questions aimed at drawing attention to the precise meaning of the word, and at helping the pupil to infer the meaning as accurately as possible from the context (when it is met during reading). An ideal teacher, in such situations, would prepare exercises in advance to elicit the answers from the students by providing interesting context for all these sets of words to show the subtle differences in their meanings.
XI
The teacher can examine nouns and noun groups that name different levels of generality and consider the rules of appropriateness in choosing one level rather than another. That is, the teacher should familiarize the students with the hierarchical arrangement of words in English lexis. This lexical phenomenon is known as ‘hyponymy’ –the higher order words are called “superordinate terms” and the lower order words of the set are called “hyponyms.” If we start with a very general word or superordinate term such as vehicle, and work towards a pattern based on different hierarchies:
- Vehicles.
- Vehicles à Buses, lorries, cars, motor-cycles, bicycles, vans, trains, ships, aeroplanes.
- Car à saloon, sports car, taxi
- Saloon à Mercedes saloons, Ford saloons, Volkswagen saloons, Peugot saloons.
- Mercedes saloon à Mercedes Benz 190 D Saloon.
Words here are arranged at five different levels of generality such that all (b)s are (a), but not all (a)s are (b)s, all (c)s are (b)s, not all (b)s are (c)s, and so on.
Here it is interesting to ask which level word one would choose for particular purposes. You are planning to buy a car; so you go to the nearby car showroom. The minute you step in the polite salesman approaches you. Then what would you say? Would you say
1) “I want to buy a vehicle” or
2) “I want to buy a car.
Sentence 1 sounds odd, even ridiculous though the car is also a vehicle.
People generally have a feeling that it is always safe to use the particular term rather than the general one. But it does not always work. Can you say
3) “Would you like a lift in my Mercedes Benz 190D/Hundai Elantra/Maruti Alto?” without inviting derision. You would certainly sound funny.
It is in such cases the teacher needs to step in and demonstrate from time to time the additional meaning that a word associated with a narrower context brings in, what suggestions are implicit in the choice of this word rather than that.
XII
Not infrequently the same vocabulary item is a member of two scales. Examples are
Old – young hard – soft short – long
Old -- new hard –easy short – tall
Failure to recognize the two scales in which an item occurs often leads foreigners into such errors as
A short building (for a low building)
A young dress (a new dress)
If the language has pairs of collocations that are opposites both members have to be learnt. Given below are two types of opposites: one belongs to general category and the other collocational category.
General Collocational
left X right a right answer X wrong
married X single a single ticket X return
wet X dry dry wine X sweet
soft X hard a hard job X easy
weak X strong a strong smell X faint
smooth X rough a rough sea X calm
heavy X light a light colour X dark
hot X cold a cold person X a warm person
high X low a high voice X a deep voice
There are three types of oppositeness:
A. Binary antonyms (complementarity) like: dead/alive, true/false, single/married, same/different, perfect/imperfect, male/female, etc.
B. Under antonymy we have gradable items such as:
Young/old, long/short, big/small, little/much, few/many, quick/slow
“She is young but she is older than her sister.”
C. Converseness includes sets of words like buy/sell, husband/wife, parent/child,
lend/borrow, above/below, employee/employer. Here it is a bi-directional sense relationship. Prediction of one term inevitably implies the other.
XIII
Teaching the Productive Processes of Word Formation:
We may try teaching the active use of Vocabulary by taking the productive processes of word-formation. Celce-Murcia (1973, p. 252) calls one such process “incorporation.” This refers to the syntactic nature of vocabulary. Examples cited by Celce-Murcia are given below:
i. They put the milk into bottles. ii. They bottled the milk.
i. Sita took the dust off the furniture. ii. Sita dusted the furniture.
i. The cowboys led the horses into the corral. ii. The cowboys corralled the horses.
In the above examples, the several activity verbs in the first of each pair of sentences have incorporated the semantic function of one of the nouns to create a new verb in the second.
The process of changing one part of speech into another without the addition of any derivative affix is called conversion.
Nouns > Verbs: ‘paper, butter, bottle, vacation’ were originally used only as nouns. But now you find constructions like “Why don’t you paper your bedroom walls?”
Adjectives > Verbs: dirty > to dirty; empty > to empty.
Adjectives > Nouns: crazy > a crazy; nasty > a nasty.
If the teacher encounters ‘conversion’ in the text, all that he is required to do is to bring it to the notice of the students and supply some more words in that category.
B. The other productive lexical process is the use of affixes, derivation. In using affixes, for example, when the native speaker says unbutton, s/he knows it means “to undo the buttons.” The prefix un- (like in unpack, uncover) is often used with verbs to denote a reversal of action (e.g. do/undo, tie/untie, quote/unquote, fasten/unfasten, lock/unlock, fold/unfold, etc.) and can thus be termed productive prefix. There are undoubtedly semantic restrictions on the use of such prefixes since they cannot occur in all contexts, but they are nevertheless common and should be taught. Although it is unrealistic to expect the students to be familiar with all the semantic restrictions (like die/*undie, eat/*uneat, run/*unrun, etc.; code/decode, frost/defrost, decentralize, deforestation, disown, etc.) it is realistic to teach them to recognize the productive affixes when they occur and to be able to use the more common ones.
C. Yet another productive lexical process worth mentioning is compounding. We have compounds like “bathroom, headache, stomachache, toothache, goldfish, birthright, earthquake, footstool” where the meaning of the compound may be derived from the combined meaning of the stems composing the compound word. They are called endocentric compounds. Here, in this category the teacher can elicit some more examples from the students and supply some from his side. However not all compounds are equally straightforward. Take for example words like: upshot, backlash, outcome, holdup, input, showdown, greenhouse. The meaning of the compounds here is not the combined meaning of the constituent stems. They are called exocentric compounds. You can ask the students to list the compounds from the prescribed text and arrange them in the categories mentioned above.
D. Another productive lexical process is clipping (shortened forms). Each age contributes its own set of new clipped forms to the language. Sometimes both the clipped and the full forms coexist. “He is a professor of Mathematics / He is a math(s) prof.” Here math/maths are the clipped forms of mathematics. Similarly, prof is the clipped form of professor. The teacher could ask his students to supply some such clipped forms from their reading of the text and newspapers. They are bound to come up with some clipped forms that you have not already listed. And yet another way is to elicit the clipped forms by supplying them the full forms, or the other way round. The class is bound to come alive when you supply: legit, hyper, ammo, max, pop, porno, grad, condo, limo, med, sale reps, mill, hoods, doc, obit, handycam, some temps, admin law, ad, vet, alco, detox, sub, rehab, prephols, varsity, mag, dorm, champ, celeb, vac, dip, geog, exam, deli, certif., ex-con, tech, info, etc.
E. Another productive lexical process is Acronymy. Words like TADA (Terrorist and Disruption Activity), RADAR (Radio Detecting and Ranging). Test them with some more words like ‘laser, CRY, FIR, FRUMP (Frugal, Responsible, Unpretentious Mature Person), AIDS, yuppies, recap, recci, jeep, FAQS, DJs, VJs,
F. Yet another important productive lexical process is portmonteau words or blends.
Breakfast + lunch > brunch; potato + tomato > pomato
Then you could give students forms that are blends and ask them to supply the source words:
Forex reserves, slumflation, Eurasia, liger, digiquette, urinalysis, digiteratti, motel, boatel, fantabulous, documedia, infotainment, mediclaim, glocal, workaholics, shopaholics, bionics, exim policy, glamdoll, romcom, sitcom, telex, electrocute, etc. Just a glance into any daily newspaper will give the English teacher ample material to use in his class room and enrich the students’ vocabulary. The only thing needed is the passion on the part of the teacher—learning will automatically follow. Language teaching should be learnt as a science but practiced as an art. No one is a born teacher; Awareness is all.
XIV
While learning vocabulary you have to pay attention to yet another side of vocabulary, i.e. style. Depending on the addresser-addressee relationship the style employed may be intimate, colloquial, consultative, informal, formal, very formal, or rigid.
A.
Frozen: Visitors should make their way at once to the upper floor by way of staircase.
Formal: Visitors should go up the stairs at once.
Consultative: Would you mind going upstairs right away, please<
Casual: Time you all went upstairs now.
Intimate: Up you go chaps!
B.
He is a nice guy. (informal)
He is a thorough gentleman. (formal)
C.
He is full of himself. (informal)
He is arrogant/self-important. (formal)
D.
Similarly if I am making a request for an increase in my salary, it would be most unwise on my part to use either imperative “Give me a pay-rise,” or an interrogative as in “Will you increase my pay next month?” These forms would certainly be counter-productive. On the other hand a circumlocutory approach would suggest an appropriate recognition of our relative status. As in
“I should, therefore, be grateful if you could give serious consideration to the possibility of increasing my salary.” Thus the more formal sentence here is not only different structurally but shows a change in vocabulary.
One would not expect you to try all this at one go or in just a class or a day. All that is expected of you is to have these things in mind when you teach next. I am sure you will be amply rewarded with affection and respect from your students for this thoughtfulness and diligence. Give them the awareness and attitude. Given these, they are on their own for life.
Notes
1. Bright and McGregor, Teaching English as a Second Language.
2. Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Fred Rosensweig. 1969. “Teaching Vocabulary in the ESL Classroom,” in Teaching English as Second or Foreign Language by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Lois McIntosh.
3. Coady, James and Thomas Huckin (eds.) 1996. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Rationale for Pedagogy. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Rationale for Pedagogy. Series Editors: Michael H. Long and Jack C. Richards.
4. Fries, C.C. 1945. Teaching and Learning Englishas a Foreign Language. Cresset Press.
5. Fries, C.C. and A.A. Traver. 1950. English Word Lists: A Study of their Adaptability for Instruction.
6. Halliday, M.A.K., A. McIntosh and P. Stevens. 1964. The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. Longman.
7. Lewis, M. 1993. The Lexical Approach: The State of
8. Nattinger, J.R. and J.S. DeCarrico. 1992. Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching.
9. Osman, N. 1965. Word Function and Dictionary Use. OUP.
10. Sinclair, J. 1985. “Selected Issues,” in English in the World, eds. R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson.
11. Sweet, H. 1964. The Practical Study of Languages: A Guide for Teachers and Learners. OUP.
12. Thorndike, E.L., and
13. Twaddel, F. 1980. “Vocabulary Expansion in the TESOL Classroom.” In K. Croft (ed.),
14. West, M. 1953. A General Service List of English Words. Longman.
Address at English Teachers' Regional Conference on Social Justice Through English Education, organised in honour of Prof.T. Vinoda on the occasion of her superannuation by Students' Welfare Center and Placement Cell, Kakatiya University, Warangal, India on 17-2-2007.
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