Нефедова А.И.

Поволжская академия государственной службы

им. П.А. Столыпина, филиал в г. Тамбове, Россия

The Role of Vocabulary and Dictionaries in Language Learning

Linguists, philosophers and pedagogues have been interested in the problems raised by words and understanding of them for centuries. The philosopher, John Locke, writing in 1690 on “Remedies of the Imperfection and Abuse of Words”, urged that concrete words were best described by pictures rather than by paraphrase or definition, which might be seen as a precursor of modern learners’ dictionaries or many present-day teaching materials.

The Frenchman Francois Gouin, frustrated by his earlier failure to learn German vocabulary, in 1880 offered to the world a new system for the learning of the vocabulary that consisted of arranging words into sets corresponding to typical sequences of actions and processes.

Much of what is said nowadays on the teaching and learning of vocabulary has been around for a long time. Fries in “Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language” attributes language learners’ concern with vocabulary to their naïve memories of their first language-learning experience; the fact is says Fries that in Language 1 acquisition of syntax was so basic and fundamental that adults have forgotten the experience. The problem of learning a new language, Fries believed, was not learning its vocabulary, but mastering its sound system and its grammatical structure. All the learner needs at first enough basic vocabulary to practice the syntactic structures.

In language there are four different kinds of words: function words, substitute words, words of negative/affirmative distribution and content words. The first three of these must be thoroughly mastered, with only a small number of content words needed. This small vocabulary should be taken from the immediate environment. After the initial stage of structural teaching then could the learner move on to the next three stages: the learning of vocabulary for production, the expansion of vocabulary for recognition and finally the learning of vocabulary for special areas of experience.

Supporters of the audio-lingual method are against the teaching of too much vocabulary and for the mastery of structure. There are several reasons for this view:

1) it is difficult to predict what vocabulary learners will need;

2) over-concern with vocabulary gives learners the impression that language learning is just the accumulation of words;

3) hesitancy of recall can result from excessive vocabulary teaching;

4) first-language acquisition proceeds with a small vocabulary until structural patterns are mastered.

It is indeed true that to learn nothing but words and little or no structure would be useless to the learner, but it is also useless to learn all the structure and no vocabulary. All must be kept within reasonable limits.

It was generally accepted that reading played an important part in vocabulary expansion. In this connection we should speak about the use of dictionaries as a valid activity for foreign learners of English, both as an aid to comprehension and production. We do not claim that the dictionary is the only, best or easiest source of the linguistic knowledge needed to understand and write or speak English accurately, but simply that in addition to other learning strategies, such as making guesses about new words encountered in reading texts, asking the teacher for explanations, or asking help from their classmates, students can and should be encouraged to avail themselves of the substantial information contained in their dictionaries.

Many of us would like to believe that teaching words in some systematic way would be helpful but naturally occurring language is not easily systematized. Trying to deduce the meaning of an unknown word from the text is one valuable strategy in understanding language, and so is dictionary use, but it is only by repeated exposures that a word can enter a person’ active vocabulary.

Students of English as a foreign language often are confronted with that they need to clarify before they can continue with the text they are working on. If unknown words are stumbling blocks to comprehension, surely it is reasonable to encourage students to make use of that help.

Nonetheless, some teachers have actively discouraged the use of dictionaries, particularly in class. Teachers’ disapproval may be caused by students’ using bilingual dictionaries too slavishly, especially small ones that they can carry around with them (Bilingual dictionaries are more generally employed in the initial stages of learning a language. As proficiency develops, greater use is made of a monolingual dictionary. Prolonged dependency on bilingual dictionaries probably tends to retard the development of second-language proficiency, even though such dictionaries are usually retained for use when definitions given in a monolingual dictionary insufficiently understood. The definitions in a monolingual dictionary should be given without difficult words). Students do indeed work on an individual word basis, in the worst sense, expecting a one-to-one correlation between the words of their own language and English. If they do not get help over the collocations, typical context, and grammatical possibilities of the word, they may make errors.

There is also the suspicion that the use of any dictionary interrupts the flow of concentration when the student is reading a passage. This fear is compounded by the notion that the dictionary is too easy a solution – it is always better for students to work out the meaning of an unfamiliar word by using contextual clues. In fact, the student must have done some useful linguistic processing of the word in order to look it up at all – for example, tracing an inflected form of a verb back to its base-form, then perhaps distinguishing the verb entry from the noun entry and so on. Although more and more teachers are realizing that vocabulary acquisition has been neglected in English language teaching, the main method of acquiring vocabulary is still through reading and reading without the help of a dictionary.

The process of reading can be viewed in terms of purpose, strategy and outcome. Purpose of reading is what makes the process necessary for the reader. Related to the purpose, a strategy of reading is chosen. The following strategies of reading are named to describe the process: skimming, scanning and critique. Skimming is reading for the gist. Scanning is reading for details. Critique is reading for critical analysis and putting to verification the truth of what is written in the text.

The process of reading can be organized with a single text (skimming and scanning reading), parallel texts (reading two or more texts on the same subject thus creating information gap between the readers), divided text (splitting the text into parts and handling them out for the learners to read and then put information together). There is also cued reading (finding information in the text as relevant to the cue given), guided reading (seeking information in the text in answer to the questions given), jig-saw reading (pooling information together of the two or more texts distributed between the learners), shared reading (reading the same text in a group but with each learner having a difficult task with subsequent sharing information), critical reading (activating thought process over the text).

While reading the learners may extract information from the text in answer to questions or other elicitation tasks, fill gaps in the text, restore the logical order of the crippled text, match headlines and passages in the text, restore the text from bits and scraps, find and tick off sentences which are logically irrelevant in the text, fit in the sentences or passages in the points of the text, where they are logically appropriate, summarize the most essential information points from a number of texts, give reader’s response on the text.

If we return to the issue of whether dictionaries should be used in vocabulary learning, then it is apparent that, while the findings of research in reading and discourse analysis show the importance of context, establishment of topic and theme and so on in deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words, this should perhaps be seen as an aid to comprehension of the particular passage being worked on and as the basis for preliminary comprehension.

In the specialized English language teaching dictionary, the student and non-native teacher have a powerful tool at their disposal, not always a perfect tool, but nonetheless a useful one, with which to gain further understanding of the range of use of new language, leading eventually to accurate production, mainly in writing. Yet, although the dictionary can “put the student in charge” teaches often do not train their students in how to use the dictionary to best advantage. The importance of vocabulary in language learning will go hand in hand with a greater appreciation of the potential of the dictionary and that dictionary training will become an interesting and valuable new addition to the students’ timetable.