A Study On Teaching Vocabulary Through Constructing Sense Relations Of English Words

Vocabulary teaching is an essential part of English language teaching."Teaching vocabulary through sense relations should be the best way to give organized access to the lexicon"(Ronald Carter, 1998). This paper is a systematic study on teaching vocabulary through constructing sense relations of words.According to semantic field theory, words do not exist in isolation; but always form structural sets of elements together with other conceptually related words that have a reciprocal influence on one another. And word meanings are defined through the sense relations. From the semantic field theory we get the suggestion that vocabulary teaching should make overt association between semantically related words. That is, sense relations should be constructed in vocabulary teaching. Sense relations refer to the meaning relations that hold within the vocabulary of a language between words themselves. Sense relations can be divided into paradigmatic relations including antonymy, hyponymy, synonymy, etc. and syntagmatic relations which mainly refer to collocations. Constructing sense relations of words has been proved to be able to precisely locate the meaning of the new items and give a deep level processing in word meaning and thus deepen learners'understanding on the new words.Our main contribution lies in combining different linguistic theories into sense relation constructing, namely, applying markedness theory in antonymy teaching; theory of basic level category in hyponymy teaching and semantic...