IMPROVING VOCABULARY FOR COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES THROUGH LISTENING USING ICTs

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Recommended: The importance of English speaking skills

Chomsky (1959) argues that behaviorism cannot provide sufficient explanations for children’s language learning. Instead, he states that the language children are exposed to, include false starts, incomplete sentences and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Children are by no means, systematically corrected, or instructed on language by parents, but somehow they manage to conjugate the verbs and later fossilize the new words.
On the other hand, according to Krashen (1981), learners learn parts of the language in a predictable order. For any given language, certain grammatical structures are discovered early, while others are taken later in the procedure. This hypothesis suggests that this natural order of learning occurs independently of deliberate teaching and therefore teachers cannot change the order of a grammatical teaching sequence.
According to this hypothesis, teachers should be aware that certain structures of a language are easier to acquire than others and therefore language structures should be taught in an order that is conducive to learning. Teachers should begin by presenting language concepts that are comparatively easy for scholars to take on and then use scaffolding to bring out low frequency words.
Scaffolding is the teaching technique that involves providing students with the supports needed to complete a task or facilitate their learning of new concepts. As the students develop their abilities in a particular area, the supports related to that area can be gradually removed as they learn the new vocabulary. Tasks and activities can be burst down into manageable chunks for the students, thus they are able to gain confidence in their abilities wi...

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...the end of the third week there was a clear improvement in the students’ recognition of the vocabulary that was enough to express likes and preferences about their favorite technological gadget.
Students tend to be more visually interactive and reiterative, they often have to listen to and understand a simple order, for that reason it is very effective to use videos, stories, and all the possible audio-visual material for listening activities (Ramirez, D. Alonso, I, 2007). Usually, teachers of English will do just their work and explain the context, without putting much effort on a true learning process. Motivations for learning English as a foreign language have not been discussed extensively in the school; however, previous researchers in Second Language Learning and foreign language settings in terms of motivation fit in that domain (Belmecheri and Hummel, 1998).

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