comments on vocabulary ppp -- Discourse and Vocabulary

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Date Posted: 19:14:11 09/20/09 Sun
Author: Carolina Duarte
Subject: comments on vocabulary ppp

Comments on vocabulary

To begin with, one thing mentioned in the text, but not in the power point, which I found important, is that the suggestions for language teaching from a discourse perspective are meant to supplement and not replace traditional vocabulary teaching.

Another important point, this one having been covered in the power point as well, is about how synonyms should be considered a linguistic device for natural discourse which perform conversational functions and not just a bunch of new words to be learned (this last part expressed in my own terms :-).

As for relexicalisation - what is most relevant for me as a teacher is the possibility of letting classroom conversations whose topics have been pre-established run off in “unpredictable directions” and develop naturally – something which intuitively I have tried to do, although I wouldn’t know yet how to “justify” this choice from a “discourse” point of view.

In the end the message I get from the summarized text is something like: no word is just an isolated word. It comes within a piece of discourse, which, in turn, presents a broader message, so to speak (the “larger textual pattern”, to be more precise).

So from now on, I should draw my students’ attention (as well as my own!) to aspects such as modality (possibility, certainty, permission – expressed not only though modals), register, adequacy, cohesion (reiteration and collocation) etc.

Then what we call “lexical competency” will correspond to much more than just “knowing many words”, but rather being able to choose the appropriate ones depending on the situation as well as knowing what meaning and function these words carry in a given text/speech/dialogue.

That’s it for my comments!

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Replies:

Justifying -- KÁTIA, 12:02:36 09/29/09 Tue