Milli mála - 26.04.2009, Page 336

Explicit instruction of new words is appropriate to begin-
ners, and includes activities devised to elaborate lexical items, e.g.
• sorting lists of words
• drawing semantic maps
• generating derivatives, inflections, synonyms and antonyms
of a word
• making trees for superordinate and coordinate words
• identifying or generating associated words
• combining phrases from several columns
• matching collocations
• completing cloze activities
• playing collocation crossword, puzzles or bingo16
Word processing involves expanding connections between what is
already known and new information. As a result the learner will
recognize the word form and its meaning automatically, thus
acquiring so-called sight vocabulary.
To enhance independent development, students need to be
trained to make inferences from new words by their context. It
is a complex activity to carry out successfully (95% of the words
in a text should be already known for a full guessing), but very
enriching because it “also includes learning about collocations,
associations and related grammatical patterns as well as mean-
ing”. 17
In addition, training in the use of various types of dictionaries
(monolingual, bilingual, synonyms, thesaurus, etc.) and corpora
will help learners become more independent in the research and
consolidation of new lexical items.
Mastery of a word involves several components (written and spoken
form, denotative and connotative meanings, inflections, deriva-
tives, collocations, register, etc.) which cannot be learned simulta-
neously, but develop with practice and exposure in different con-
VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
336
16 Alan Hunt and David Beglar, “Current Research”.
17 Ibid.
Milli mála 8_Milli mála 8 4/28/10 8:19 AM Page 336