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This paper aims to analyse some formal vocabulary teaching strategies employed in the ELT classroom context as well as limitations that appear in the process of reception and students'' production of vocabulary. Additional components included in this productive process of vocabulary acquisition, which should lead to students'' "efficient retrieval of the lexical item for active use" (Pavicic Takac, 2008: 10) are also considered. In order to understand the process of acquiring lexis, it is first necessary to understand what exactly the term vocabulary acquisition encompasses. Therefore, linguistic, psycholinguistic and semantic theoretical explanations denoting the terms "vocabulary" are given. According to Norbert Schmitt an average user should be able to know somewhere between 90% and 98% of lexical items both in spoken and written English in order to be proficient (Schmitt, 2008: 331). Moreover, for a productive use of wide range of lexical items in addition to their first and most important lexical aspect, their spoken/written forms and meanings, students also need to acquire a number of other lexical aspects. These more contextualized aspects are to be learned through students' frequent exposure to ample context extent. The classroom environment, however, offers restricted possibilities in this regard. Even though, most ESL textbooks and teaching materials provide authentic materials including many frequent words in both spoken and written form, and rely on the so called "naturalistic approach", which places emphasis on guessing the meaning from context and favouring "implicit incidental vocabulary learning" (Pavicic Takac, 2008: 18), they frequently fail to provide enough room and concentration on explicit teaching of essential vocabulary. The case study about the effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition conducted using the above mentioned methods was carried out on a group of first-year undergraduate students. The results are in accord with Schmitt’s (2008) findings that confirm that the most beneficial approach to long-term vocabulary retention needs to include an explicit approach which focuses directly on establishing the form-meaning link followed by the frequent exposure approach and recurrent incidental learning. Finally, the efficiency of this approach should be reinforced by an increased amount of engagement students should have with vocabulary acquisition. |
