Designing vocabulary tasks contents introduction

Task-based language learning. The focus of the teaching is on the completion of a task which in itself is interesting to the learners. Learners use the language they already have to complete the task and there is little correction of errors.
The natural approach. This approach pronounced by professor S. Krashen stresses the similarities between learning the first and second languages. There is no correction of mistakes. Learning takes place by the students being exposed to language that is comprehensible or made comprehensible to them.
The lexical syllabus. This approach is based on a computer analysis of language which identifies the most common words in the language and their various uses. The syllabus teaches these words in broadly the order of their frequency, and great emphasis is placed on the use of authentic materials.
Several linguists have proposed putting of vocabulary, not grammar, to the centre of the classroom in order to help learners develop their ability to use English for real communication. I would say the best way is when neither grammar nor lexis is underestimated and attention is paid to both in the same extent in the lessons. But then teachers have to deal with the problem how to include besides grammar also an effective teaching of vocabulary into their lessons.
There are two main approaches to vocabulary teaching – the list approach and the contextual approach. The list approach means that a list of vocabulary items with their meanings is given to pupils to learn them. The items may or do not have to be semantically related to the topic that is currently taught. I think that this approach is most spread at our basic schools. What may contribute to this is that it is probably most comfortable way for teachers how to teach vocabulary. The contextual approach relies on pupils discovering the meaning of words through reading and related activities, which seems to me to be more effective than the list approach because the learners must think and produce their own initiative and endeavour to find the meaning of a word.
The linguists are dealing also with the question whether vocabulary should be learnt explicitly or implicitly. The Communicative approach led to the implicit (also called incidental) learning, which “is learning that occurs when the mind is focused elsewhere, such as understanding a text or using language for communicative purposes. Various researchers have concluded that learners should be given explicit instruction and practice in the first two to three thousand high frequency words (…), while beyond this level, most low-frequency words will be learned incidentally while reading and listening. The reason that explicit learning is thought to be necessary in the initial stages is that, unless a high percentage of words on a page are known, it is very difficult to guess the meaning of new words from context.”⁹
Some very interesting experiments carried out by Brown and Mc Neil¹⁰ exemplify this point forcefully and give us clues about lexical organisation. The experimenters gave testees definitions of low frequency vocabulary items and asked them to name the item. One definition was, 'A navigational instrument used in measuring angular distances, especially the altitude of the sun, moon and stars at sea'. Some testees were able to supply the correct answer (which was 'sextant'), but the researchers were more interested in the testees who had the answer 'on the tip of their tongues'. Some gave the answer 'compass', which seemed to indicate that they had accessed the right semantic field but found the wrong item. Others had a very clear idea of the "shape' of the item, and were often able to say how many syllables it had, what the first letter was, etc. It seems, then, that these systems are interrelated; at a very basic level, there appears to be a phonological system, a system of meaning relations and a spelling system.
We can think of the mental lexicon, therefore, as an overlapping system in which words are stored as 'double entries' - one entry containing information about meaning and the other about form. These individual word entries are then linked to words that share similar characteristics, whether of meaning or of form - or both.. The number of connections is enormous. Finding a word is like following a path through the network, or better, following several paths at once. For, in order to economise on processing time, several pathways will be activated simultaneously, fanning out across the network in a process called 'spreading activation. Knowing a word, then, is the sum total of all these connections — semantic, syntactic, phonological, orthographic, morphological, cognitive, cultural and autobiographical. It is unlikely, therefore, that any two speakers will 'know' a word in exactly the same way.