Teaching English: teaching vocabulary skills
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture "Teaching English: teaching vocabulary skills", where we will look at different practices and modern approaches to vocabulary development in foreign language students. The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, Candidate of Philology.
The teaching of lexical skills is a relatively new area in English language teaching methods. Since World War II, teaching methods have focused mainly on the teaching of translation or grammar. For a long time, grammar was regarded as a kind of "centre of the universe" — an unassailable body of knowledge that was equated with knowledge of language. With the development of transformational (generative) grammar, proposed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky, teaching methods changed, but grammar remained an important area of study.
However, in the mid-1990s, a groundbreaking concept of language learning emerged. Michael Lewis’s lexical approach redefined our understanding of language, placing the lexicon — combinations of words and phrases that drive communication — at the heart of linguistic competence.
Achieving competence in lexical knowledge goes beyond memorising words; it is about achieving ability to use them fluently in context. How do you achieve excellence in such practice? We will touch this upon in the next lecture.
Lecturer
Nina Shcherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish as part of the celebrations to mark the 300th anniversary of Russia’s oldest university — St Petersburg University.