Semantic Network for Vocabulary Teaching

Abstract

Vocabulary instruction concentrates on teaching strategies with which students will eventually be-come independent readers and interested in words (Nagy and Herman, 1984 and 1987). It is, however, unclear what learning strategies that students should learn and which aspect of word knowledge that students should explore. This paper proposes that text for vocabulary learning provide context from which students can judge the definitions of the new words, and that they explore semantic fields of new words. An independent reader has many skills two of which are to learn definitions of new words with contextual information (Jenkins and Dixon, 1983; Stahl, 1985 and 1986) and to establish relationships between new words and familiar ones (Irvin, 1990; Maiguashca, 1984; Martin, 1984; Ramsey, 1981; Trirnmo, 1993; Weatherford, 1990). When learning new words with the two mentioned skills in mind, students not only concentrate on learning word meanings but also focus on strategies for exploring word relationships.