Creating word-meaning awareness

• Paula Jullian ^[1]
  1. [1] Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

     Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

     Santiago, Chile

     
• Localización: ELT journal: An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages, ISSN 0951-0893, Vol. 54, Nº 1, 2000, págs. 37-46
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper will be of special interest to teachers concerned with lexical semantics, and those who wish their learners to gain in accuracy and lexical force. It reports on an activity carried out with upper-intermediate and advanced learners to help them increase their word-meaning awareness and expand their active vocabulary. These learners usually manage to communicate satisfactorily, though often by using a very limited lexical code mostly made up of core words. The overuse of these general terms makes their discourse sound poor and even childish, especially in adult learners, and makes them fail to convey different moods, connotations, or specific semantic loads. The activity described here introduces learners to the study of word meaning. It helps them to understand the full semantic content of related words, and so to detect what makes them similar and different from each other. The task consists of collecting a lexical set; studying those of its semantic features and distinguishers which convey unique meanings, and identifying appropriate collocations, contextual limitations, and possible figurative uses.