The Importance Of Foreign Language In General And English Language

1.1 Preliminaries The outstanding developments in technology and communications have made learning foreign languages in general and English language in particular essential for every individual. English language has become an international language and a means of communication among people all over the world. In learning a language, there are four skills that we need to improve for complete communication. They are listening, speaking, reading and writing. Obviously vocabulary size influences the four skills. Indeed, vocabulary is the building block of every language skill without which one is quite speechless, Mostaan (2012). Ellis (1997) believes that vocabulary knowledge can assist grammar acquisition because knowing the words in

For instance, learners cannot understand a reading passage if they do not have an adequate vocabulary and do not have the skills to guess meaning from context. In summary, vocabulary knowledge is an essential component of learning a second language for several reasons. Both native speakers and learners recognize the importance of getting the words right because lexical errors are numerous and disruptive. Thus, it is important for learners to have good lexical skills in order to produce sentences and to understand them correctly (Gass & Selinker, 2001). One way to decrease the problem is to help students in becoming independent learners during the process of second language vocabulary learning (Maleki, 2010). This could be achieved through instructing learners to use vocabulary learning strategies as effectively as possible. Rivers (1981) suggests that “vocabulary cannot be taught. It can be presented, explained, including in all kinds of activities, but it must be learned by the individual” (p.110). She continues, “As language teachers, we must arouse interest in words and a certain excitement in personal development in this area” (p.

Accordingly, numerous types of approaches, techniques, exercises and practices have been introduced into the field to teach vocabulary. One of such techniques is brainstorming that is an effective technique for teaching vocabulary at all stages of the study and specialties (Lotfi, 2014). Through this device, students can freely express and then comprehend various vocabulary structures, ideas, etc. The role of brainstorming in obtaining educational objectives in various fields was extensively under research recently. Many empirical studies have been performed considering the effectiveness of this approach in group idea generation. Brainstorming was the term proposed by Dr. Alex Osborn in 1953. Osborn (1953) defined this new technique as: “An organized way to allow the mind to produce ideas without getting bogged down in trying to judge the value of those ideas at the same time" (Kirk & Spreckelmeyer, 1993, p.