skanowanie0065 (5)

11.2.6. What a teacher needs to know to teach grammar:

H Pattem and form, e.g. the present perfect is formed from the present of have + the past participle.

2.    Lexical restrictions, e.g. the present perfect often occurs with sińce and for etc.

3.    Concept, function and meaning, i.e., what concepts is the form used to express (e.g. a present state starting in the past), what does it mean, what functions is it often used to express (e.g. talking about experiences). This is particularly important when you are deciding how to present new items.

4.    Common problems, e.g. conceptual, confusion with simple present, problems with irregular past participles.

11.2.7. Tasks / assignments for self-study.

1.    Prepare two pictures that differ in certain important features and devise a grammar presentation activity, for example Past Perfect, or ‘used to’ form, etc.

2.    Prepare a time linę and examples to introduce basie concepts of use of Present Perfect Continuous tense.

3.    Make up a grammar task to revise the use of the form “going to”.

11.3. Teaching Vocabulary

11.3.1. What is vocabulary?

Vocabulary can be defined, roughly, as the words we teach in the foreign language. However, a new item of vocabulary may be morę than a single word: for example, post ofp.ee and mother-in-law, which are madę up of two or three words but express a single idea. There are also multi-word idioms such as cali it a day, where the meaning of the phrase cannot be deduced from an analysis of the component words. A useful convention is to cover all such cases by talking about vocabulary ‘items’ rather than ‘words’ (Ur, 1996:60).

Vocabulary together with grammatical structure is helpful in expressing meaning speakers want to convey. Grammatical knowledge allows speakers to generate, create sentences, but it is the storę of words that speakers select from when meanings wish to be expressed.

In the past vocabulary was neglected, but sińce recently methodologists and linguists have been turning their attention to it, stressing its importance in language teaching (based on French Allen, 1983).

11.3.2. What do students need to know?

(based on Gairns and Redman, 1986)

Vocabulary items freąuently have morę than one meaning so it is not always the best idea to look a word up in a dictionary. When a student comes across an unknown word, they should try to decipher its meaning from the context it is used in - it is therefore necessary for students to understand the importance of meaning in context. There are other problems that arise while teaching vocabulary. Sometimes words have meanings in relation to other words — there is therefore the need for students to get acąuainted with certain sense relations, as well as conceptual meaning.

11.3.2.1. Conceptual meaning

a)    polysemy is a term referring to a single word form with several different but closely related meanings; e.g. the ‘head’ of a person, the ‘head’ of a pin, the ‘head’ of an organisation, etc.,

b)    homonymy describes a single word form with several different meanings which are not closely related; e.g. a file may be used for keeping papers in, or it may be a tool for cutting or smoothing hard substances, etc.,

11.3.2.2. Sense relations

a) synonymy refers to a group of words that share a generał sense and so may be interchangeable in a limited number of contexts; e.g. extend/expand/increase; nil/zero/0/nought/love (in tennis match), etc.,