Vocabulary and the Syllabus

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more linguists are beginning to talk about the importance of vocabulary teaching and the neglect that vocabulary has suffered as a subject area in Applied Linguistics. This has come about largely because teachers realise that, even with a solid basis in structure and with the present-day addition of an attempt to teach communicative function, the learner is at a loss without a command of the hundreds of lexical items he encounters and is expected to ‘learn’. Words are the biggest problem, and there are so many of them.