LANGUAGE IN INDIA

TECHNIQUES USED FOR VOCABULARY ACQUISITION
Mohammad Mohseni Far, M.A.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER

The purpose of this paper is to pore attentively research over vocabulary learning/acquisition strategies in a second/foreign language. First, a sketch of person, task, context, and strategies is introduced to pay particular heed to the review. After that, experimental research along task, person (learner) and contextual dimensions is flipped through. In particular, the review zooms in on task-dependent strategies such as guessing strategies, dictionary use, note-taking, mnemonics and word-formation. Instead of seeking the best strategies that produce the best results, the investigator argues the relative efficiency of each strategy. The principle notion underlying this study is that the most effective and efficient lexical development will occur in multifaceted curriculums that achieve a pedagogically sound balance between explicit and implicit activities for L2 learners at all levels of their development.

THE ANALYTIC CONTENTS DEALT WITH IN THIS PAPER

Vocabulary acquisition is seen as an integral area of language teaching by linguistic researchers. Psychologists, linguists and language teachers have been interested in vocabulary learning strategies for a long time. They have come to understand the role of the lexicon in language learning and communication. Accordingly the increased attention to vocabulary teaching has become more important. In particular, during past fifteen years, the field of second language acquisition has seen renewed interest in vocabulary learning and acquisition. There are many dimensions to vocabulary acquisition, as reflected in the multitude of different areas of research being done on the topic.

In order to conduct the research in a more systematic and logical way, the researcher takes prominent variables such as person, task, context and strategy into account. These four factors are primarily introduced and defined, then in subsequent parts they are dealt with in great details. Having taken these important variables into consideration, the investigator also tries to shed significant light on major issues and comments concerning each variable.

CONCLUSION

Word knowledge has linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects. Lexical competence is far more than the ability to define a given number of words; it involves knowing a great deal about each word, including information about its general frequency of use, the syntactic and situational limitations on its use, its generilizability, its collocational probabilities, its underlying form, its derived forms, and its semantic features. The process by which learners acquire this information appears to take place gradually over a long period of time, is very complex, and is quite difficult to investigate. In conclusion, a lot of work has been done to find overall patterns of strategy use.

However, the choice, use, and effectiveness of vocabulary learning strategies very much depend on the task (e.g. breadth vs. depth), the learner (e.g. cognitive and cultural styles of learning, motivation), and the context.

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