In spite of the fact, that dull, unimaginative ways of teaching vocabulary are not at all going to disappear in the nearest future, there is a clear tendency among active and highly-motivated teachers to use at class more creative and up-to-date lexis learning techniques, which involve into the process students’ imagination, emotional response as well as the ability of memorizing things. Not to stick to unnecessary details, we are going to focus on a limited number of methods which have been proved highly-effective in practical teaching vocabulary to upper-intermediate students. As soon as our objective is outlined, a few questions immediately arise: What is vocabulary? What does it mean to teach vocabulary? Does knowing a word simply have to do with knowing its definition? Here we go.
First, it is better to start with definitions. According to Macmillan Dictionary*6, vocabulary is “all the words that a person knows”. For the word ”teaching” there is a good simple definition, which says “teaching” is “the activities of educating or instructing; activities that impart knowledge or skill”*9. The Oxford dictionary online*7 says something very similar, but in other words: “Give information about or instruction in (a subject or skill)”. Summarizing it all up, we understand that to teach vocabulary means to enlarge the number of words students know. But there are still some other questions to answer: What does it mean to know a word? Is learning new words a subject (theory) or a skill? What objectives are to be pursued by the teacher in the teaching vocabulary process? It is clear enough, that knowing a word does not only mean being able to recognize it in its spoken and written forms, but it also means “knowing its different meanings; knowing its part of speech; being able to pronounce it properly; being able to use it correctly within a sentence in an appropriate grammatical… Knowing a word, then, is the sum total of all these connections – semantic,...