Vocabulary Teaching Techniques And Learning Strategies At Middle School Level

Beginners often manage to communicate in English using individual words; and they can most of the time convey meaning without necessarily having acquired grammar. This is evidence that in learning a language, grammar is not sufficient and, thus, more importance has to be given to vocabulary. However, vocabulary instruction and learning have always been secondary to grammar, and vocabulary has been considered as only a means and not an end in language teaching and learning. Classroom blackboards are often littered with masses of new lexical items and learners often compile word lists rarely helpful in their learning. Teachers’ techniques most often do not match their pupils’ different learning styles and the different strategies the latter utilize when encountering new vocabulary. In this article we attempt to show the relationship between middle school teachers’ techniques in presenting vocabulary and the strategies pupils use in order to deal with new vocabulary. At the outmost, we will show the degree of correlation between the teachers’ techniques and the learners’ strategies and give some directions to help develop the teachers’ techniques in order to meet the learners’ strategies and styles in learning vocabulary.