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Here is some of the vocabulary use:
a. Helping us master kinds or levels of meaning
In mastering the kinds or levels of meaning such as the words with their lexical meaning are, they are by no means the only essential meanings in the
symbols and devices of a language and also the lexical content of the various words-
the words as listed and defined in a dictionary. In the sentence “The old man killed the little bear”, the dictionary does tell us the kind of beings to which
the words man and bear refer it will explain the particular type of action for which the word will is a symbol. And it will give us some notion of the qualities
included in the meanings of such words as old and little. This is however practically all the help the dictionary can give. It does not tell us whether old is to
be taken as a characteristic of the man or of the bear; or whether the bear or the man or both are little. The dictionary cannot tell us whether, in this particular
sentence, the man bear performed the action. So the syntactical, the positions in which old and little stand in relation to man and bear give us the essential meaning
that it is the man that is old and bear that is little. The fact that the old man precedes the word killed and that the little bear follows that word. Killed conveys
the meaning that the man Rather than hear performed the action. Here, syntactical meaning absolutely essential to any understanding of the utterance expressed by
the word order. Morphological meaning or the forms of the words. The form of the word
man in contrast with men and the form of the word bear in contrast with bears signals the feet that there was but one man and but one bear. In similar fashion the
form of the word killed indicates the fact that the action has already occurred. It is not now in process nor projected for the future.
b. Developing Reading Skill
The reading action of each book contains materials on techniques of reading and studying, as well as on such skills as test taking and reasoning. Major
emphasis is placed on the vocabulary development. Use of the dictionary, use of context as a clue the meaning, and the analysis of words through the study of
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prefixes, suffixes, roots, and combining forms are treated thoroughly at each level. Vocabulary enrichment is based on words found in the text and the activities.
These exercises appear frequently throughout the texts. The second, the art program, illustrates and discusses interesting words related to a specific thematic
idea in each book of the series
17
. To master a language is not necessary to read it, but it is extremely
doubtful whether one can really read the language without first mastering it orally. Unless one has mastered the fundamentals of the new language, that is, as a set of
habits for oral production and reception the process of reading is a process of seeking word equivalents to his own native language, such a reader never enters
into the precise particular way the foreign language grasps experience he is still using as means of grasping meaning or understanding only the processes and
vocabulary of his own language with the added difficulty of seeing a different set of symbols on the printed page which must act as clues from which he must guess
the correct words of his own language to be substituted in order to make some kind of sense. He never really entails into the tough the full meaning expressed
by the foreign language. It means that having a lot of vocabulary stocks will help us not only grasp the meaning or understand the language we learn, but also get
the exact meaning of our reading.
c. Distributing the Use According to Grammatical Matters
If we examine vocabulary use, there are so many useful things, especially its distribution to grammar matters. Such the words, although some of them may
have also full-word meaning content, primarily or largely operate as means of expressing relation of grammatical structure. This includes the so-called
auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, interrogative particles, and miscellaneous group consisting of the words for degree, for generalizing, the articles, etc
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. All these words are called as function words or the words which have special function
and meanings.
17
Millie John and Paulene M. Basis Language, Harper and Row Publishing, Inc, Now York, USA, 1982, P. iii
18
Charles C. Fries, Teaching and Learning English as Foreign Language, P. 44.