People can be said well in mastering vocabulary, if they master many vocabularies. Without vocabulary, people cannot express an idea, opinion, and feeling in daily life. There are some aspects of vocabulary that should be learnt by students. Those are about lexical item are its written and spoken form and its most usual meaning. However, there are additional aspects which also need to be learnt, such as, grammar, collocation links, connotations, appropriateness of use, and relationships with other items in English Ur ( 2012: 60-62). They are as follows:
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'The Use of Running Dictation Game to Increase Students' Vocabulary Mastery'
- Pronunciation and spelling
The learner has to know what a word sounds like (its pronunciation) what it looks like (its spelling). Many people assume that meaning is more important than form: but remember that knowing a meaning is pretty useless without knowing the form it is attached to.
- Meaning: denotation
The meaning of word or expression is what it refers to, or denotes, in the real world. This is given in dictionaries as its definition. Sometimes a word may have various meanings: most often these are metaphorical extensions of the meaning of the original word (for example, the foot' of a mountain, deriving from foot as part of the body). But sometimes a word such as bear has multiple meanings (bear the animal and bear meaning 'tolerate') because they are derived from two different words which happen to have developed into the same form (homonyms).
- Grammar
The grammar of new item will need to taught if this is not obviously covered by general grammatical rules. An item may have an unpredictable change of form in certain grammatical contexts (for example, the past tense of irregular verbs), or may have some particular way of connecting with other words in sentence (for example, the verbs which take-ing forms after them rather than the to infinitive).
- Collocation
Collocation refers to the way words tend to co-occur with other words or expression. For example, we normally say tell + the truth but no say + the truth. A specific phrase may be grammatically correct and yet sounds wrong simply because of inappropriate collocation. For example, you can do your homework, but you cannot make it.
- Connotation
The connotation of a word is the emotional or positive negative associations that it implies. The word moist and damp, for example have the same basic meaning (slightly wet): but moist has favorable connotations while damp has slightly unfavorable ones. So you could talk about a moist chocolate cake, which sounds appetizing; but a damp cake would imply that something had gone wrong with the recipe.
- Appropriateness
To know how to use an item, the student needs to know about its appropriateness for use in a certain context. Thus, it's useful for students to know, for a particular item, if it is very common or relatively rare; or if it is usually used in writing or in speech, in formal or informal discourse.
- Meaning relationships
Through this is perhaps less essential for students than the aspect discussed above. There are various such relationships: here are some of the main ones.
- Synonyms
A synonym is items that mean the same, or nearly the same. For example, Bright, clever, smart may serve as synonyms of intelligent.
- Antonyms
The definition of an antonym is items that mean the opposite. For example: Rich is an antonym of poor.
- Hyponyms
Hyponyms is items that serve as specific examples of a general concept. Example, namely dog, lion, mouse are hyponyms of animal.
- Co-hyponyms or coordinates
Co-hyponyms are other items that are the same kind of thing'. For example, red, blue, green and brown are co-hyponyms or coordinates.
- Superordinates
A superordinate is general concepts that cover specific item. For example, animal is the superordinate of dog, lion, and mouse.
Keep in mind:
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- Translation
Translation is words or expressions in the students' L1 that are similar in meaning to the item being taught but may have slightly different connotations or contexts of use that it is interesting to explore.
