A preliminary overview of English vocabulary learning and teaching. The case of collocations and idioms in CSE in Andalusia

Abstract

The present proposal aims to reflect on the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Andalusian secondary schools. More specifically, attention is paid to vocabulary learning and teaching from a communicative approach as opposed to other possibilities, such as the Grammar Translation method. For the development of this topic, the context in which English is studied has been considered (namely, a public bilingual high school in the province of Málaga). Students’ profiles and their socio-cultural context are contemplated too. In fact, this project is aimed at 4th year of Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE) students, with an average of a B1 level according to the CEFRL, who are 15-16 years old. Thus, this paper is aimed at various objectives. Firstly, its main intent is to cover effective methods to enhance students’ communicative competence in English and help them expand their vocabulary in the target language by fostering their involvement in different communicative situations in class. Another crucial purpose is to research on activities, routines, and techniques to be promoted in class to improve learners’ motivation, a key element in CSE. One more goal is to suggest general measures and a suitable method to cater for mixed abilities and respond to the learners’ real needs and interests. Each of them will be discussed in the literature review, together with semantic relationships such as “antonymy”, “homonymy”, and "synonymy”, which play a relevant role in vocabulary learning and teaching. In addition, for the sake of clarity, an analysis of the context in which English is studied in this project will be provided. Moreover, other ideas, such as the fact that words do not have to be treated and taught in an isolated way when learning/teaching any foreign language, will be considered. Furthermore, it is also taken into account that the meaning of words depends on their relationships with other words and that they also group together to belong to more complex structures, such as collocations and idioms. Thus, in vocabulary learning and teaching it seems essential not only to work with words and the relationships established between each other, but also to focus on how they collocate and group to form meaning, instead of studying the meaning of lexical items separately. Taking this idea as a starting point, a wide range of approaches and techniques to teach vocabulary in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context will be detailed. Therefore, some of the main activities, resources, routines, and tools that can improve these intermediate level students’ motivation and willingness to participate in all the tasks will be included, as well. To conclude, vocabulary is not just a matter of writing down in a notebook a long list of words with their translation into the students’ mother tongue. Vocabulary learning will be achieved through experiencing situations in which they will see how native speakers use the language. What is more, students need to learn both collocations and idioms because they will help them speak and write English more accurately and naturally. Learning them will help them increase their range of English vocabulary, too. Dialogues seem to be the optimal method for mastering vocabulary, as learners will find themselves in such a communicative situation in the future. Since EFL teachers often face large multilevel classes which are as varied as the students in them, it appears to be necessary to integrate all the aforementioned resources and tools to facilitate learners’ comprehension of oral and written texts. Those should also encourage their active involvement as well as their inclusion and participation, thus allowing students to work and cooperate with each other and learn from one another.