Resume of The Content Analysis of the Research Paper on

Foreign Language Education in Turkey

By :
Gede Suadnya Suastika
1812021070
2B
English Language Education

Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha

2019
Teaching Vocabulary: The Relationship between Techniques of Teaching and
Strategies of Learning New Vocabulary Items
Tariq Elyas1 & Ibrahim Alfaki1
Keywords: vocabulary, teaching techniques, learning strategies
Aims : to investigate the techniques of teaching new lexis which are adopted by non-native
teachers of English language. It also aims to investigate the strategies of learning new lexis
which are adopted by learners in relation to their level.
Hypotheses : It is hypothesized that there is a relationship between the techniques and strategies
which are used for teaching and learning new English lexis.It is hypothesized that the level of
learner, might not affect his or her choice for a particular strategy.
Sample: the pupils of the seventh class, the eighth class and teachers of English language at the
Basic level schools, in the River Nile State, Sudan, in the school year 2014.
The instruments which were used to collect data, were two questionnaires (a teachers’ version
and a pupils’ version).To analyze and interpret the data percentages and Chi Square were used.
The results showed that there is a relationship between the techniques of teaching and the
strategies of learning new lexis.The chi-square test showed that, the results were statistically
significant at level 0.05 and this supports the second hypothesis that the learner’s stage of
learning does not affect his or her choice of a particular strategy.

Teaching and learning vocabulary have been covered mainly by educationalist and
linguists, they set up the main frame of teaching and learning new vocabulary. Teaching and
learning vocabulary have received much discussion by researchers as well as by linguists, and
have been in focus among researchers.
Importance of Vocabulary in Learning English Language
Laufer (1997, p. 147) says: “vocabulary is no longer a victim of discrimination in second
language learning research, or in language teaching. After decades of neglect lexis is now
recognized as central to any language acquisition process, native or non-native. What many
language teachers might have intuitively known for a long time, that a solid vocabulary is
necessary in every stage of language learning, is now being openly stated by some language
researchers”.
Change is due to the spread of the audio lingual method followed by the communicative
approach, since then the findings of applied linguistics slim down the syntax and gives more
importance to the lexicon. This revolution of vocabulary has created explosion of publications on
vocabulary aimed at second language teachers and course designers.Jordens et al. (1996, p. 359)
believe that vocabulary is more important than grammar because people generally use
vocabulary and reduce grammar particularly when getting a message across quickly and
precisely and is of the utmost importance; like telegrams, panic situations or times when
emotions are very high. Moreover, the number of ungrammatical sentences people speak and
write is enormous, unless they need to convey complex messages precisely. It is clear that
vocabulary has been recognized as a key area of language knowledge. Hatch 1978 believes that
the foreign language learner needs for lexical elements in early stage as well as in later stage of
the learning process, is often far greater than the need for grammatical rules this why travelers
take dictionaries not grammar books when going abroad. Vocabulary is central to English
language teaching because without sufficient vocabulary students cannot understand or express
their own ideas Wilkins (1972, p. 111) states: While without grammar very little can be
conveyed without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”.
Knowing a word
Medani (1994, p. 39) states that knowing a word is knowing the lexical information or
aspects that is related to it, and involves questions of whether the information about a particular
lexical item, is available (easy accessible) for both comprehension and production or whether it
is only available for comprehension. There are some aspects of knowing a word, there are
frequency, “Frequency of a word in a language means the number of occurrence of a linguistic
item in a written or spoken form (Richards et al., 2001, p. 112)”.
There are three main components of situation of a word. They are the field, which
presents the subject matter and the goal of the message, tenor or the relationship between the
receiver and the sender and finally the mode or the tool or the channel of communication.
According to Taylor (1990, p. 2) register is the knowledge of the limitation imposed on
variations of function and situation. Collocation is also another aspect that should be known
about a new item, which is intended to be taught. Taylor (1990, p. 2) says that collocation means
knowing the syntactic behavior associated with the word and also knowing the network of
association between that word and other words in the language. It shows the relationship
between words. It is important to know the morphology of a new item. It is to know the
underlying form of a word and the derivations that can be made from it. And the last aspects are
denotation and connotation, as what sounds a word contains and their sequencing then the
meaning of the word both connotative and denotative meanings, what category or part of speech
the word belongs to and how to use it in a sentence. Finally, how related words, including plurals
and past tenses are formed. Finegan (1994, p. 77) writes knowing even simplest word requires
that phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic information be stored in the lexicon as
a part of that words mental representation.
Type of Vocabulary
A distinction is usually made between active and passive vocabulary. Doff (1988, p. 19)
says “words which we want student to understand” (e.g. When reading a text) but which they
will not need to use themselves, call them “passive vocabulary”, words which students will need
to understand and also use themselves, we call them “active vocabulary”. Nation (1990, p. 4)
classifies vocabulary into three groups high frequency words, low frequency words and
specialized vocabulary. What is important here is that learners should know the criteria of how to
choose, and understand words. This will be achieved when they are able to differentiate between
types of vocabulary. They are not in need to know every word which confronts them.
Meaning of Word
The study of meaning in a language is not as easy as many teachers considered. There are
at least three kinds of meaning which can be differentiated in describing the semantic, content of
language. They are lexical, grammatical and experiential meaning (Robinett, 1978, p. 111).
Lexical meaning is that found in the dictionary when we want to know what a word means, the
meaning is given in terms of the relationship of the symbols (the word) to our cognitive
experience in the real world. Pyles and Alegeo (1970, p. 96) mentioned that “where we say that
words have meaning we are saying that they are a kind of sign. Signs are of many sorts, A
thunder cloud is a sign that it may rain, As a linguistic sign the word is neither sound nor
meaning alone, but a relationship between the two “then the lexical meaning is learned by
connecting a word in its spoken or written form with the category of things to which it belongs in
the world of experience.
In addition to that grammatical meaning which is derived from syntactic or grammatical
relationship within the language. As example, the lexical item boy in (the boy hit the dog) brings
with it in addition to the lexical meaning “a young male human being” the meaning of “doer”
because of its relationship in that particular utterance to verb hit. However in the sentences “the
car hit the boy” the word boy, while retaining the same lexical meaning as in the sentence above.
It has the grammatical meaning of “receiver” because it bears a different relationship to the verb
hit. Thus, whenever a lexical item occurs in a grammatical construction it carries with its
grammatical as well as lexical meaning.
There are some techniques of teaching new lexis :
 Translation
One of the most common techniques is translation, that is to translate the word in
question into a learner’s native language. Some experts however do not recommend this
technique (Doff, 1988, p. 12) “if we only give a direct translation, the students cannot see
how the word is used in an English sentence”. Translation is simple, clear and quick for
reaching the goal, particularly when teachers give examples then students give the word
translation.
 Giving Examples
Giving examples is another way (technique) of showing the meaning of a new word,
these examples should contain the meant lexical item McCarthy (1990, p. 108) believes
that new vocabulary knowledge is most efficiently absorbed when it is assimilated to the
already known words by using it in a context, Complex explanation of a vocabulary item
will lead to a narrow scale understanding, for the case that a meaning can be shown with
very simple sentences.
 Realia
 It is obvious that a new item can be taught by presenting the real object in question into
the classroom, for example an object, this can easily be brought into the classroom, such
as: pen, cup, book, hand, desk, ruler, etc. But it is one of the most beneficial techniques.
 Concept
According to Carroll (1964, p. 34) there are several conditions, which help the
establishment of concept Firstly, they should be positive examples of the concept,
secondly, there should be negative examples. That is to say the learners are shown things
that are not (bodies). They are told that these are not (bodies), thirdly, these positive and
negative examples need to be arranged in the best way of learning.
 Description and Definition
According to Nation (1990, p. 56) to define a word is to show or explain its meaning. An
adequate definition of a word shows its meaning as distinct from the meaning of others
words and nothing but its meaning. In other words it aims to the characteristics which
belong to this concept as distinct from others, it makes the boundaries of a concept as
clear by given some indications of the range of situation to which the symbol can refer.
 Pictures and Mime
By pictures we mean photos, blackboard drawing, wall pictures, chart and flash card.
Pictures can also be used to create a situation or context (Harmer, 1985, p. 85). In this
situation teachers can use e.g. a city map, school map and then try to introduce the item in
question.

There are some strategies of learning new lexis :

In this section we focus on these learning strategies of new lexis. It is clear that each learner has
his own favorable procedure for coping with new lexis.
 Inferring Meaning
Mc Carthy (1990, p. 125) states that (inferring) means drawing conclusion as to meaning
by following certain rational steps in the face of the evidence available. According to this
definition inferring is based on the surrounding lexis either they are spoken or written.
But the term guessing to some extent is vague. Therefore, it is better to adopt the term
inferring than guessing. Inferring is a process that learners would follow when they
encounter a difficult or new word either as a written or spoken piece of information in
any situation instead of asking someone or open the dictionary, where it is not possible or
appropriate.
According to Nation (1990, p. 6) guessing is the most important strategy that learners can
use in order to cope with new vocabulary. The inferring of the meaning of a particular
word depends mainly on the other words that are included in the sentence. It is clear that
if there are many difficult words in a text or a sentence, the fewer students can infer the
meaning of that word and vice versa.
 Using Dictionary
Using dictionary as a strategy of learning new words in a foreign language is considered
as one of the most fruitful strategies. Learners can look into a dictionary for many
purposes for examples to rearrange words which are out of the alphabetical order to find
the meaning of a difficult word, to find derived forms under mother head word, to find
out pronunciation and to check spelling of the target words. Learners should be aware of
these dictionaries to get much information. They should be sure that they have the ability
of choosing appropriate meaning. Nation (1990, p. 155) encourages the use of
monolingual dictionaries although there is a need for bilingual one. He says: “the best
dictionaries for productive purposes are monolingual that is, the meaning and extra
information is given in the same language as the word.” There is a need for productive
bilingual dictionaries where learners can look up a word by beginning with a word in
their mother tongue, and then find an English word with information about its grammar,
collocation, etc to guide its use.

Conclusion :This study was conducted with the purpose of investigating, whether the
level of learners (7th or 8th class) influences his/her choice of a particular strategy for
learning new words. Moreover, the study attempted to find out if there is a relationship
between the techniques of teaching new words and the strategies of learning new lexis.
Concerning the relationship between the techniques of teaching new words and the
strategies that were adopted by the learners taking no notice of their levels, it was found
that the most preferred techniques were inferring, realia, words relation, morphological
clues and words explanation. While the most preferred strategies of learning were
inferring, correction of misunderstanding, translation and asking teachers for explanation.
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