TEACHING VOCABULARY: AN INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING IN INDIA

This monograph on "Teaching Vocabulary" grew out of my teaching and resources production in the field of English Language Teaching as foreign language teaching, for a number of years. I believe that this article will be found highly useful for the teacher training courses in India and South Asia. This article discusses various linguistic, psychological and educational aspects of acquisition, use, and teaching of vocabulary. Initially, the author begins with discussion on the criteria that are used to identify word, the concept of word according to some Indian grammarians, and seeks to classify the vocabulary stock of an individual or of a language according to certain criteria on the basis of the shared characteristics of vocabulary. It further discusses how vocabulary items are generated in a language. In order to prepare the instructional materials, and in order to understand the vocabulary of the speakers of a language, various types of vocabulary studies are conducted in India and abroad.