The role of teaching vocabulary in the efl classroom

Vocabulary is the main part of teaching second language to understand the reading, listening, speaking and writing. Investigations show that the average adult native speaker of English possesses knowledge of from 17,000 to over 40,000 base words. Furthermore, an L2 learner of English must acquire a minimum of 3,000 base words to be capable of reading unsimplified text with some degree of comprehension. However, Nation (1990) said that there are 54,000 word families in English. Many studies confirm the connection between vocabulary size and reading comprehension. Some even argue that increase in vocabulary improves quality of reading comprehension and learning. Schmitt ( 2000) mentions that a person needs to know between 95-98 % of the words in a text in order to understand it successfully. Most researchers found an interest in vocabulary teaching by analyzing in two factors such as the language corpora and lexical method for teaching vocabulary in the last 20 years. In this article, firstly it will be discussed about what kind of lexical coverage and size L2 students need to learn to understand the reading text or written passage. Secondly, the discussion is continued with one of the benefits of teaching vocabulary through lexical and corpus approach. Finally, it will be suggested that techniques involving incidental learning are successful at improving vocabulary.