Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Kovács, Éva: The History of Teaching Vocabulary

- 130 An other important representative of the linguistic approach is Charles Fries who gave a detailed analysis of the linguistic approach in his Teaching and Learning English as a foreign Language published in 1945. Fries's most important contribution to language teaching is that the basis of modern language teaching should be the comparative structural analysis of the mother tongue (L^) and the target language (L2). Thus he places special emphasis on the mastering of structural patterns, which served as a basis for Lado's pattern drill. Only after much practice of the same patteros with diverse content do patterns themselves become productively automatic. When the student has reached this level of achievement, within a satisfactorily useful but definitely limited range of vocabulary items, he "has learned" the language (Fries 1945: 9). The system of vocabulary is given new priority in Fries's methodology. Fries classifies vocabulary according to their frequency in the following way: 1. structural words - these are the most frequent ones that is why they should be taught relatively early 2. syntactic morphemes 3. content words - the biggest group in number When teaching lexis Fries objects to bilingual semanticizing. Fries emphasizes that besides the denotative winning of n word the cnnnntntive meanings should also be taught. In other words this means that if we have learnt or taught 'tiead' for 'fej' in a context, i. e. the denotative meaning, we should learn or teach its connotative meanings, too, such as 'head of a cabbage', 'head of a bed', 'head of a departmeot'. As we will see later this concept appears in Baljaev's consciouspractical method. This point-of-view of teaching vocabulary could be accepted psychologically and linguistically, but methodologically it would be to much to require. On ttie one hand, it would take the teacher a lot of time to present all the different meanings and on the other we may run the risk of losing the context. The other reason why Fries is against the use of the mother tongue as a means of semanticizing is that no two languages will present the same analysis of the situations and as a result, the words of one language