Presenting and Teaching Vocabulary in the EFL Classroom

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, University of Kassel, course: Teaching Grammar and Vocabulary, language: English, abstract: This paper is going to deal with the question how vocabulary can be introduced in the EFL classroom and why it is essential for students to learn new vocabulary and know how to use it in context. Furthermore, it deals with the points that are involved in presenting and demonstrating vocabulary and it also focuses on the teachers and learners and which roles they play in the whole process of vocabulary acquisition in the EFL classroom. It is important to see that the teacher needs to work actively with the students on the process of acquiring new vocabulary and the students need to be involved in the learning process. The teacher needs to show the students the necessity of learning vocabulary since this is the most important part of foreign language learning because without vocabulary they will not be able to communicate and understand text that are written in a foreign language. In order to be able to speak a foreign language properly, the students need to learn vocabulary because otherwise they will not be able to express and articulate themselves in a way that other students or native speakers of English can understand them. It is the teacher¿s task to support the learning process of the students and to show them ways of learning vocabulary through different teaching approaches and different methods. There are many different ways of presenting and teaching vocabulary in the EFL classroom but which of them are most efficient? That is a question that has been discussed for many years now and one could come to the conclusion that there is not only one right way of teaching vocabulary but a variety of different approaches that can help the teacher in presenting and teaching new vocabulary. A mixture of many different ways is always more effective than using only one way of teaching which is also very boring for the students. In earlier times, the teacher centred teaching was used in classes in general but times have changed and this term paper will show what kind of different types of teaching vocabulary in the EFL classroom there are nowadays and how the students are actively involved in every step.