Designing vocabulary tasks contents introduction

1.1. Approaches to teaching English as a second language
Vocabulary has not always been considered as an important part in second language teaching and much more attention has been paid to teaching grammatical and phonological structures. I would like to sum up some linguistic approaches that were appearing during the 20th century.
Methods of Foreign Language Teaching. There are some language teaching methods in practice today:
1. The Grammar -Translation Method 2. The Direct Method 3. The Audio-Lingual Method 4. The Silent Way 5. Suggestopedia 6. Community Language Learning 7. Total Physical Response Method 8. The Communicative Approach and others.
The Grammar-translation, Direct and Reading approaches- The focal points of the Grammar-translation approach are explanations of grammar and translations from mother tongue to foreign language and vice versa. It focuses only on written skills. Vocabulary is taught in the form of isolated lists. Learners and a teacher speak in their mother tongue in the lessons; the active foreign language is used rarely.
The Direct approach developed initially as a reaction on the Grammar-translation method and it focused more on spoken skills and teaching inductively with no use of mother tongue.
The characteristic features of this method are the practical direction in the teaching of foreign language, the ignoring of the existence of the mother tongue, use of visual aids and various exercises both written and oral. The method is called direct because it aims to establish a direct connection between the words in the foreign language and their denotations. The grammatical rules are discovered through many examples. Students speak a great deal in the target language and communicate if in real situations. Speaking and listening skills and correct pronunciation are emphasized. Teacher/student interaction is fuller; it includes guessing of context or content, completing fill-ins, question-and-answer exercises.
The Reading approach focused on reading and written skills. The vocabulary of the early reading passages and texts is strictly controlled for difficulty. Vocabulary is expanded as quickly as possible, since the acquisition of vocabulary is considered more important than grammatical skill. Translation reappears in this approach as a respectable classroom procedure related to comprehension of the written text.
The Audio-lingual method. American linguistic theories that had been dominant in the 1940s- 1960s emphasized grammatical and phonological structures and neglected teaching vocabulary. Such a theory is the Audio-lingual method that is based on behaviour psychology and its view that language learning is a matter of habit formation. It adapted many of the principles of the Direct method and was a reaction to the lack of speaking skills of the Reading approach. The method is based on teaching drills of basic sentence patterns and their pronunciation and new words are used only as they are needed to make the drills possible.
Vocabulary giving the learners the grammatical principles and rules is strictly limited and need to be simple for them to be understood. Pupils should learn the structural frames and later, they can learn the lexical items to fill the grammatical slots in the frames.⁴
As a result of that, the learners are very well theoretically informed but if it arises such a situation which requires usage of the language – e.g. conversation abroad, writing an email or a letter in the foreign language – they will be incapable or will have problems to express their opinions and attitudes.
The communicative approach appeared in the early 1970s. It could be said to be the product of linguists who were not satisfied with the Audiolingual and Grammar-translation methods. They emphasized use of “language for meaningful communication, including the appropriate use of language in particular single social contexts (for example, informal conversation at the dinner table versus formal conversation at the bank, etc.).”⁵ But still, vocabulary was viewed only as a help for functional language use. This attitude changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when vocabulary itself became the object of linguists’ interest, which led to development of vocabulary studies and to researches on more effective vocabulary teaching and learning strategies. Textbooks began to contain exercises to practise lexis.