The Strategies of Enlarging English Vocabulary.doc

英语词汇提高策略the strategies of enlarging english vocabularyabstract: memorizing english vocabulary is an everyday learning activity for many students in china. for many years, programs that prepared learners of second language gave little attention to techniques for learning vocabulary. as we enter the 21st century, acquisition of vocabulary has assumed a more important role.nowadays, it is agreed by all that vocabulary is the building blocks of a language. without vocabulary verbal communication is equal to impossible. this thesis is aimed to deal with the strategies of learning english vocabulary.it starts with the discussion of what is involved in the learning of a new word, then studies the factors affecting vocabulary learning. two important vocabulary strategies are put forward and discussed in detail.key words: english vocabulary; vocabulary learning conditions; vocabulary learning strategies摘要： 对大多数中国学生来说，记忆英语词汇是每天的学习任务。许多年来，英语教学材料中给学习词汇的技巧没有太多的关注。而当我们进入21世纪，学习词汇已变得越来越重要。如今，词汇是语言的基石已被语言学习者所广泛接受。没有词汇口头交流是不可能的。这篇论文将致力于讨论学习英语词汇的策略。论文开篇将展开讨论学习一个词汇需要注意的一些方面，然后研究了影响英语词汇学习的因素。在这篇论文中提出了两种学习英语词汇的重要策略并且展开了细节讨论。关键词： 英语词汇; 词汇学习条件; 词汇学习策略contentsi. introduction.1ii. what is involved in the learning of a word?.1iii. factors affecting word learning ability.2a. pronunciation.2b. derivational complexity.3c. abstractness. 4d. specificity and register restriction. .5e. idiomaticity.6iv. strategies of learning vocabulary.6a. discovery strategies.6 1. determination strategies.6 2. social strategies.8b. consolidation strategies.9 1. mutual strategies.9 2. memory strategies.9 3.pictures/imagery.10 4. related words.10 5.unrelated words.10 6. grouping.11 7. words orthographical or phonological form.12 8. other memory strategies.12 9. cognitive strategies.13 10. metacognitive strategies.14v. conclusion.15works cited.16the strategies of enlarging english vocabularyi. introductionfor chinese students, vocabulary learning has been a time-consuming task. memorizing vocabulary is a burden to a large number of students. teachers of english know very well how important vocabulary is. they know students must learn thousands of words that speakers and writers of english use. but for many years, programs that prepared learners of second language gave little attention to techniques for learning vocabulary. some books appeared to telling learners that they could learn all the words they needed without help. in fact, teachers were sometimes told that they ought not to teach many words before their students had mastered the grammar and the sound system of the language. pronunciation and grammar were emphasized, but there was little or no emphasis on vocabulary.vocabulary is the building blocks of a language. without vocabulary verbal communication is impossible. the task of vocabulary learning is a substantial one of learners. fortunately, the need for vocabulary is one point on which teachers and students agree. in teacher-preparation programs today, there is more attention to techniques for teaching vocabulary. with this shift emphasis, the classroom teacher is faced with the great challenge of how best to help students store and retrieve words in the target language.the study of vocabularylearning strategies is a promising area of inquiry. this is because it is possible to define the learning targets and strategies very precisely. and also to investigate strategies that have wide currency in the literature. also, vocabulary learning strategies lend themselves to experimental investigation.ii. what is involved in the learning of a word?in most linguistic analyses a word is described as a set of properties or features. (for various approaches to the definition of a word, see (chomsky, 1965; gibson and levin, 1975). by way of summary, it is generally agreed that knowledge of the following is necessary in order to know a word：a. formspoken and written, that is pronunciation and spelling. b. word structurethe basic free morpheme (or bound root morpheme) and the common derivations of the word and its inflections.c. syntactic pattern of the word in a phrase and sentence. d. meaning：referential (including multiplicity of meaning and metaphorical extensions of meaning), affective (the connotation of the word), and pragmatic (the suitability of the word in a particular situation).e. lexical relations of the word with other words, such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy. f .common collocations.thus knowing a word would ideally imply familiarity with all its features, as is often the case with an educated native speaker. however, in the case of language learning, knowing may be partial. the learner may have mastered some of the words properties but not the others. in fact, the multiplicity of features to be learned increases the probability of words being problematic and therefore only partially learned since problems can arise from one or more of the areas. there are words which learners know in the sense of knowing what they mean in certain contexts, but which they cannot use productively. other words vary in how easily they can be produced: some words can be retrieved only with effort; some are momentarily inaccessible; others can be expressed instantaneously. iii. factors affecting word learnability a. pronunciationforeign learners too experience phonological difficulties related to phonemes, combinations of phonemes and suprasegmental features. what makes some words phonologically more difficult than others is very much determined by the learners system. the system may be responsible for the learners inability to discriminate between some phonemes and subsequent confusion of words differing precisely in these problematic phonemes. such words may be perceived as homophones. for example, spanish speaking learners of english may have difficulty with distinguishing between pairs like ban/van, day/they, while hebrew speakers have difficulty distinguishing between live and leave, bed and bad, think and sink. the spanish speakers may have trouble with pronouncing words like just, shop, and strange, the hebrew speakers find it difficult to pronounce final consonant clusters in clothes and films.familiarity with phonological features and a words phonotactic regularity (its familiar combinations of features) were shown to affect accuracy in perceiving, saying and remembering the word. english-speaking learners of russian showed that foreign words which were difficult to pronounce (e.g. mgla) were not learned as well as the more pronounceable ones. gibson and levin (24) report a series of experiments on nonsense wordssome pronounceable, some unpronounceable for particular language speakers. (e.g. sland versus ndasl). the results showed that the pronounceable words were perceived more accurately than the unpronounceable ones. on the other hand, many linguistics found no relationship between difficulty of pronunciation of some hebrew items and their acquisition by english-speaking learners of hebrew. but she admits that in her study the factor of pronounciation ability might have been neutralized by other factors which had more effect on the acquisition of particular words. correct pronunciation of a word requires stress on the right syllable. learners of languages with fixed stress (e.g. penultimate in polish, initial in finish) will have a simpler task than learners of a language like english where the place of the stress is variable (e.g. photograph, photographic) and has to be learned as part of the words spoken form. moreover, the weakening of unstressed vowels (e.g. 1abour and laborious) introduces yet another factor of difficulty, particularly for learners unfamiliar with this phenomenon. in view of all the above mentioned pronunciation difficulties, there may be a gap between the learners ability to perceive a word and his/ her ability to produce it correctly. one strategy to cope with the problem is avoidance of these phonologically problematic words. for example, an english-speaking learner of hebrew may choose to avoid the word xaver, which contains the sound /x/ and use jadid instead, both meaning a friend. this is usually the case with adult learners who are self-conscious of how they sound. b. derivational complexitythe learners ability to decompose a word into its morphemes can facilitate the recognition of a new word and its subsequent production. for example, familiarity with the meaning of the suffix -ship and the word scholar will enable him or her to recognize the meaning of the word scholarship. the awareness of ante- and pre- as being synonymous can help the learner realize that prenatal and antenatal are identical in meaning.however, the lack of regularity with which morphemes can or cannot combine to create meanings or the multiplicity of the meanings can be a source of difficulty. a special case of morphological difficulty in comprehension is what could be called deceptive transparency. deceptively transparent words are words that look as if they were combined of meaningful morphemes. for example, in outline, out does not mean out of. the learners assumption here was that the meaning of a word equal the sum to of meanings of its components. this assumption is correct in the case of genuinely transparent words, but not when the components are not real morphemes. in an experiment involving deceptively transparent words, it was found that more errors occurred with such words than with non-deceptively transparent words. learners were unaware of the fact that they were reading unfamiliar words. this was the case even with words that made no sense in a given text context. c. abstractnessit is often assumed that abstract words are more difficult than concrete words because the former are intrinsically more complex than the latter： concrete words are the easiest to learn. neither young nor older students have trouble in learning numbers, days of the week, colors, names of objects and the like.(allen and vallette 114)this is true in the case of first language acquisition where lexical and cognitive development go hand in hand. second language learners, however, have already developed abstract concepts in their learning. why then should an abstract word like love be more difficult to understand and remember than a concrete word like book?even if we agreed with allen and vallette that days of the week and colours are indeed concrete words, empirical evidence does not necessarily support the correctness/ease connection. allen and vallette reports that her english-speaking learners of hebrew had more difficulty with learning. the two types of blue in hebrew (kacbol/tcbelet) than with learning many abstract nouns, which was apparently due to the lack of distinction between the two colours in english. teachers of english to hebrew speakers know that, at the beginning, learners confuse tuesday with thursday, presumably due to the similarity in form. arab learners of english find difficulty with such apparently simple words as cousin, aunt and uncle, since they do not perceive enough information in these words (whether the cousin is male or female, whether the aunt or uncle are from the fathers or mothers family).thus, it cannot be claimed that concreteness in itself can assure ease in learning. many abstract words may require simply learning a new form for a familiar concept. on the other hand, concrete words may be problematic if they contain other factors of difficulty. d. specificity and register restriction in their study of lexical simplification, foreign learners (and also writers of simplified texts) tended to use words set up as superordinates (general terms) where the majority of the native speakers used co-hyponyms (more specific terms). for example, the learners preferred the hebrew equivalent of put instead of impose. baxter (152) conclude that：.learners will prefer words which can be generalized to use in a large number of contexts. in fact they will over-generalize such words, ignoring register restrictions and collocational restraints, falsifying relationships of hyponymy, synonymy and antonymy. a related problem is the register restriction of some words. foreign learners are very often unaware of the fact that lexical items frequent in one field or mode of discourse may not be normal in another, that words acceptable when used with some interlocutors may be out of place with others. halliday and strevens (88) point out that：.the choices of items from the wrong register, and the mixing of items from different registers, are among the most frequent mistakes made by non-native speakers of a language. (1964: 88) it follows, therefore, that general and neutral words, which can be used in a variety of contexts and registers are less problematic for production than words restricted to a specific register, or area of use. the former may cover a large area of meaning and fit several contexts while the latter may require the learner to familiarize himself or herself with extra-linguistic phenomena, such as the socially-defined relationships between individuals in the language community. e. idiomaticityboth teachers and learners will admit that idiomatic expressions are much more difficult to understand and learn to use than their non-idiomatic meaning equivalents. thus, decide would be easier than make up ones mind. marton (17) sees the problem of idioms as the biggest obstacle to fluent comprehension in advanced learners. also bensoussan (69) found that idioms were among the principal pitfalls in reading comprehension. he examined the avoidance of phrasal verbs by hebrew speakers both in free expression and in elicited responses. they found that hebrew speakers showed significant preference for one-word verbs where english speakers chose the phrasal verbs, e.g. postpone was preferred to put off, and reprimand to tell off. these results are not surprising, since the learning load in the case of idioms is particularly heavy. not only is there more than one word to learn, but also there is little or no clue whatsoever as to the meaning of the idiom from the meaning of each individual word that builds it up.idiomaticity seems to present a difficulty even when the two languages, l1(language1) and l2(language2), are similar in the use of idiom. kellerman (178) found that dutch learners of english transferred those dutch idioms into english which involved core meanings. if, on the other hand, the idiom involved a more peripheral, metaphorical meaning, the learners assumed it would not transfer. even though the idioms kellerman investigated (with the words break and eye) were semantically and formally equivalent in dutch and english, there was only a limited facilitating effect on learners performance. similarly, martin(189) found that even though dutch-speaking learners did not avoid phrasal verbs as a category, they avoided some figurative phrasal verbs that were dutch cognates: go off, bring up, break out.iii. strategies of learning vocabulary a. discovery strategies 1. determination strategiesif learners do not know a word, they must discover its meaning by guessing from their structural knowledge of the language, guessing from an l1 cognate, guessing from context, using reference materials, or asking someone else. determination strategies facilitate gaining knowledge of a new word from the first four options. learners may be able to discern the new words part of speech, which can help in the guessing process. they can also obtain hints about meaning from its root or affixes, although not always reliably. cognates are words in different languages which have descended from a common parent word, such as mutter in german and mother in english. languages also borrow words from other languages, and these loanwords often retain similarities in form and meaning (e.g. the indo-european loanwords in finnish-auto, firma, golf, numero). if the target l2 is closely related to a learners l1, cognates can be an excellent resource for both guessing the meaning of and remembering new words. of course, 1earners do not automatically accept cognates as equivalent. learners are generally more willing to believe that the prototypica meaning senses of a cognate are transferable across languages compared to nontypical senses (kellerman278). also, the willingness of learners to accept that another language (l1,l2,etc.) can be useful in learning their l2 (in this case by using cognates) depends on the perceived distance between the two la