Vocabulary And Its Acquisition In Pragmatic Awareness

With the development of College English reform, more researches on the new teaching approaches are carried out by teachers, which have had great achievements. Nevertheless, we must recognize the status quo that the present models in the English classroom in China are time-consuming and inefficient for they have failed to teach students how to put what they have learned into practical use. This is particularly true in the field of vocabulary teaching and learning. The author attributes this phenomenon to the lack of a complete and practical theory of vocabulary acquisition. However, we can trace this lack to the long neglect of vocabulary in the field of second language acquisition.Among ordinary language learners, the acquisition of vocabulary has long been felt to be a crucial component of learning a foreign language. Language learners must develop large vocabularies in order to become proficient in a second language. But the teaching and learning of vocabulary have been undervalued in the field of second language acquisition throughout its varying stages and up to the present day.It is generally held that the ultimate purpose of foreign language teaching is to cultivate learners' competence for using the language. But in the teaching process, it has been found out that linguistic knowledge is paid more attention to while pragmatic knowledge is neglected. This is also true in the field of vocabulary teaching. Actually, it is believed that pragmatic knowledge attributes more to the success of communicative performances. Learners maybe have a large size of vocabulary, but it is a pity that most of them cannot express themselves freely, in other words, they lack the pragmatic competence for using vocabulary naturally and appropriately in communication.Pragmatics is a new branch of linguistics, which stresses the study of "language in use" and "communication value". It focuses on the tact and appropriacy of language in communication. The author thinks pragmatic theory is of great use in vocabulary teaching and learning. In fact, pragmatic theory has been utilized in the foreign language teaching. The prevalence of communicative approach and thelearner-centered methodology have illustrated the point that pragmatics do contribute much to the foreign language teaching. But with regard to the application of pragmatic theories to the teaching of words in second language acquisition, few have been found to do field research on this topic. If we apply the theory of pragmatics to vocabulary acquisition, we should focus on cultivating learners' pragmatic competence for vocabulary. Only when a learner can use the word or understand the word appropriately under different situations, cari we say the learner has really acquired this word. The dissertation sets out to analyze the relationship between pragmatics and vocabulary acquisition. Based on the analysis, the author proposes several vocabulary teaching strategies which are devised under the guidance of pragmatic theories. Such strategies include teaching vocabulary through communicative activities, paying attention to cultural differences loaded by vocabulary, making full use of context in the process of vocabulary teaching, paying attention to the associative meaning of word, etc. The dissertation also points out the deficiencies in vocabulary teaching, such as teaching vocabulary out of context, teaching vocabulary with no regard to cultural differences. Some measures aiming at these deficiencies are put forward. The author has adopted the mentioned strategies in vocabulary teaching in recent years, which is proved to be very efficient through practice.