Developing Secondary School Students’mental Lexicon

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INTRODUCTION

The present paper is divided into five chapters, each of them highlighting the importance of mental lexicon in secondary students’ educational life. In this respect, the first chapter analyzes the representation of semantic knowledge in the mental lexicon, treating aspects such as the mental lexicon, what is "knowing a word"?, structure of the categories, words and culture, the multilingual mental lexicon: similarities and differences between lexical acquisition in the first and second languages, the learning of lexicon or the development and organization of the mental lexicon.

The second chapter is represented by certain methodological proposals and in this respect, one may observe concepts of method and approach, evolution of the methodological proposals related to the lexicon, first stage in lexicon teaching-methodological proposals second stage in lexicon teaching- methodological proposals, third stage in the teaching of lexicon- methodological proposals, as well as current methodological approach.

Chapter no. three highlights the content, planning, practice and didactics of lexicon, emphasizing the lexicon content in the programming of English as Foreign Language (EFL), the lexicon planning in EFL programming, different strategies for learning vocabulary based on the functioning of the mental lexicon, learning the vocabulary in context: working with placements and concordances, but also the role of literature in English lexicon teaching and learning.

The fourth chapter takes into consideration language teaching from different approaches, taking into consideration the following: language teaching from a lexical approach, the development of the vocabulary from the perspective of texts understanding, understanding texts- a way to work with vocabulary, linguistic and didactic considerations on the treatment of vocabulary, lexical learning from a cognitive-discursive perspective, English vocabulary teaching-learning with the Collage method, personal notes, the new role of the student, the new role of the teacher and also didactic implications.

In chapter no. five, one will observe the experimental stage regarding the impact of modern educational means and interactive methods in developing students’ mental lexicon. In order to realize the present research, one emphasizes the pre-experimental stage- basic tools and methods, the premise and the aims of the research, methods and techniques of investigation, the experimental stage- testing, the post-experimental stage- evaluation/ conclusions.

A relatively recent and very interesting field of research for the acquisition of second languages ​​or foreign languages ​​is the configuration of the bilingual or multilingual mental lexicon. Some of the main questions of these investigations are, for example: the functional or structural similarity or difference between the mental lexicon in L1 and L2, as well as the nature and degree of interconnection or integration of the lexicon Whether or not it consists of several modules and, if so, how the different components are related.

In all EFL programming, it is essential that a common basic lexicon for all students appears. This lexicon should be systematically worked in class with activities where you work exclusively. The student should be directed towards learning strategies so that he or she can independently learn lexicon: use of different types of dictionaries, derivation processes, composition, etc. The teacher should be concerned with the number of lexical units that the learner should understand and use, but also the use he can make of them, different communicative situations, different topics, etc.

CHAPTER I. THE REPRESENTATION OF SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE IN THE MENTAL LEXICON

1.1 General aspects

In learning any language, the development of lexical competence is always considered as one of the fundamental pillars for the progress of communicative competence in that second language. The advantage of having a good vocabulary that solves communicative needs is unquestionable; likewise, lexical competence allows us to express ourselves and to understand what is manifested to us in the communicative interaction. In short, learning the lexicon of a foreign language can be a rewarding process if we are attentive to new words and expressions, and, as in our mother tongue, we are curious to discover the information they contain.

It is clear that the methodology applied in the teaching of lexicon must be based on the linguistic, cognitive and psychological principles that underlie lexical competence. We agree with several authors (Laufer 1994, Marconi 2000, Aitchison 2012; Wray 2005) in that the lexical units are linguistic signs that represent grammatical, referential, discursive, sociocultural and strategic phenomena; hence they act as instruments for the development of communicative competence. The lexical planning that the teacher develops in the classroom must take into account this epistemological proposal and, therefore, must select the type of lexical units most suitable to develop each of the subcomponents that are part of the lexical competence: words, routines, etc. (Council of Europe 2001, Aitchison 2012, Wray 2005).

No one doubts how difficult it is for the teacher to predict exactly what words a particular student will need in his everyday communicative interaction, since in most cases it is not possible to determine in the long term in which situations and for what needs the student will use English in the future. That is why it is important for students to acquire a degree of autonomy (self-learning) when using words that are unfamiliar to them. It is necessary to prepare the learner to be able to deduce meanings, to recognize the different meanings of a lexical unit, its formal and combinatorial aspects, as well as its functioning in the discourse. There are several authors (Gairns and Redman 1986; Nation 1990, 2001) who have emphasized the importance of student participation, the need for new words to emerge from the learners themselves, and thus suggest a variety of practical techniques for the achievement of this personal motivation.

Sometimes, in our mother tongue, we find it difficult to understand a lexical unity, either because we can not remember its concrete meaning, or because it is unknown to us. In these circumstances we employ strategies that help us to solve the problem and it is very useful to know if the same strategies are applicable to the teaching-learning of an L2 or FL. This concern is explained by Gu (2005: 85) when he points out the need for studies on language learning strategies to be based on vocabulary and for studies on vocabulary acquisition to be based on language development strategies and strategies Which apprentices use spontaneously.

1.2 What is "knowing a word"?

The knowledge of a word includes different aspects because each lexical unit comprises several components. On the one hand is the semantic knowledge (the actual meaning of the word, including the connotations and associations that this entails) and on the other hand the knowledge about the form, which in turn includes the phonetic aspects and graph as well as the composition of the lexical unit of smaller units. The third type of knowledge about the lexical unit – that related to its use – comprises the grammatical functions of the lexical unit, its placements (the possibilities of combination with other lexical units) as well as the limitations of its use (Nation, 2005: 47). These three components are not independent of each other but there are several meeting points:

For example, placements are seen primarily in the use of words, but they also influence the meaning of words. And also the formal fact that a lexical unit is composed of other units has clear repercussions on its meaning. This conception of lexical competence thus underlines the close interrelationship between lexicon and grammar, as it is being defended in a large part of the currents of current linguistics and as it has begun to be noticed in many applications to the didactics of languages.

Of the three types of knowledge mentioned – meaning, form and use – the most complex aspects of learning a foreign language are probably those related to semantics (because the meaning itself is complex and because in contrast to another language is even more) and with the use. For this reason, in the following sections we will explore two aspects of the meaning of lexical units that are especially important for the acquisition of vocabulary: the mental representation of meaning as well as the combinatorial relationships of words with others.

The functioning of the brain and its influence on language learning is a complex subject that has been and is the subject of numerous neurolinguistic investigations. For example, the idea of ​​a strict functional division between left hemisphere and right hemisphere has been relativized in more recent research. Although studies with aphasic patients suffering from different brain lesions have shown that there is some specialization of certain areas of the brain, it seems that there is no specific module responsible for a specific type of activity but different areas interact for its realization. The brain is therefore understood as a system of neural networks that are continually reorganized. Understanding and producing language, like other brain functions, are very complex processes that take place through the association and coordination of information from different sensory sources (Heidemann, 1996: 66-80).

Accurate knowledge of what happens in our brain when we learn a language is therefore still limited. However, models of representation have been developed that attempt to explain how the brain analyzes information, how it stores and represents knowledge in memory, or how it activates and recovers it. For example, cognitive psychology distinguishes between short-term memory (or working memory) and long-term memory, between semantic memory and episodic memory, and between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (Glover, Ronning and Bruning, 1990: 102). However, the model that may be most illuminating when it comes to understanding how we acquire new words when we learn a language is that of the mental lexicon and, derived from it, that of the multilingual mental lexicon. We will present both concepts briefly below.

1.3 The mental lexicon

By mental lexicon is meant the structure that allows the organized storage of information in the long-term memory. In order to understand its operation, the analogy of a very complex network formed by nodes (the concepts) interrelated through multiple connections is often used. Each concept3 or category is associated with phonological and graphematic, morphological, syntactic as well as semantic information (Börner and Vogel, 1994: 4). Semantic associations are based on various types of relationships: hierarchical relationships, co-occurrence frequency, similarity of meaning, and so on. (Heidemann, 1996: 29). The whole of the relations of a concept to other concepts constitutes what we mean by its meaning. It is not, therefore, a unique and invariable meaning: The associations raised by a lexical unit are not totally equal for all the speakers of a language but are to some extent individual of each person, since we are configuring them according to our linguistic and vital experience.

1.4 Structure of the categories

Cognitive psychology studies (Rosch, 1973, 1975, 1978) have shown that the entry-level categories – the most common concepts – have a prototypical structure, meaning that there are more central examples and more peripheral examples. For example, the word "bird" makes most English speakers think of types of birds as the sparrow, dove, seagull or similar – which would be central elements of the category – but not so much in a penguin or a Ostrich, which, while still belonging to the category, occupy a more peripheral position. Other important principles of categorization are:

(a) the fact that there are often no sharp edges between categories but that they are blurred and

(b) that the relationship between members of a category can be described as a "family resemblance" in the sense of Wittgenstein (1953:23). Family similarity refers to the fact that there does not have to be a single semantic feature (or a group of them) that is applicable to all members of the category, but the constellation of features may be variable.

1.5 Words and culture

To return to the model of the mental lexicon, we could summarize that, for a specific speaker, the meaning of a lexical unit is formed by multiple associations and relationships with other concepts, which the speaker has been establishing and enriching throughout his life. Another important aspect of this experiential view of meaning is that it also includes connotations, sensations, judgments, etc., and these can be marked by culture. For example, for a native speaker of German, the word Sonntag ("Sunday") refers not only to the neutral concept "seventh day of the week" or "day of the week between Saturday and Monday" but to a whole series of specific connotations of German culture like Sonntagsfrühstück, Kirchenglocken, Familientag, Sonntagsspaziergang or Kaffee und Kuchen (Sunday breakfast, bells, family day, Sunday walk or snack with coffee and cakes). If the environment in which two people have grown and have been linguistically formed is similar, these conventional aspects of the concepts will also be similar. However, if they come from different cultures, the connotative meaning that both relate to the same word can be very different and even lead to misunderstandings (think, for example, in the words "nationalist" – "nationalistisch"). In this manner, words that appear to be fully equivalent in two languages ​​may differ considerably in the connotative aspects of meaning (Wald / forest, Brot / pan, August / August). On the other hand, the culture also has repercussions on the aspect mentioned in the previous point – the structure of the categories. For example, if we look at the concept of 'tree', in German culture an oak or chestnut could be considered as prototypical trees, whereas a palm or orange tree would not be central examples of this category in the German language-culture.

1.6 The multilingual mental lexicon: Similarities and differences between lexical acquisition in the first and second languages

A relatively recent and very interesting field of research for the acquisition of second languages ​​or foreign languages ​​is the configuration of the bilingual or multilingual mental lexicon (see, for example, Schreuder and Weltens (1993), Singleton (1999) or Wolter (2001) Some of the main questions of these investigations are, for example: the functional or structural similarity or difference between the mental lexicon in L1 and L2, as well as the nature and degree of interconnection or integration of the lexicon Whether or not it consists of several modules and, if so, how the different components are related (Cenoz, Hufeisen and Jessner , 2003). A question that is not easily accessible to observation and, consequently, the results seem to be still too provisional (and even contradictory) to draw conclusions for the teaching of languages. In contrast, the lexical acquisition process has been extensively studied in a second Language, and here we can see some basic differences compared to the acquisition of the first language (Neuner-Anfindsen, 2005:55):

The learner of a second language is in a phase of more advanced physiological and cognitive evolution.

The input a learner receives from a second language is very different from that of a child who learns their mother tongue.

The learner of a second language has already passed through the learning of a language, so he has already passed the first stages of lexical evolution.

On the other hand, there are also commonalities in the learning experience of L1 and L2 (Singleton, 1999:89). On the one hand, in terms of phonetics, the learner of an L2, like the learner of L1, has to learn to distinguish between phonemic and non-phonemic differences in L2, both for reception and for production. An added difficulty is that the learner of the L2 already has a phonological system of reference (that of the L1), which can cause interference. On the other hand, there is some parallelism at the semantic-conceptual level: Although the L2 apprentice may in many cases resort to the conceptual structure of L1, he will also have to learn concepts that are entirely new to him or that have only a partial correspondence With the existing concepts of L1.

1.7 Basic issues

Basically, one may state that there are two proposals about the name that receives each one of the units of which the lexicon is composed. One of the two proposals is represented by the traditional part of the word, while the other proposal, by a part of the lexical unit as a learning unit.

The word is defined by a criterion of form, whereas a lexical unit is defined by a semantic criterion, of meaning, and not of form, since a lexical unit can be formed by more than one word.

Among the authors who use the word „word” are Richards, Oxford and Scarcella (1994), Laufer and Nation (1999: 62). For Richards to know a word is to know the degree of probability of occurrence of that word, to know the limitations of use, to know their syntactic behaviour, to know the underlying form and its derivatives, to know the network of associations between the word in question and the rest of The same language, know its meaning, know the meanings associated with it. For Oxford and Scarcella, knowing a word means being able to use it communicatively in the context of interaction. Nation distinguishes between receptive (passive) and productive (active) knowledge and defines knowing a word in terms of skills.

Boogards (2010: 65) focuses on the lexical unit and not on the word. The idea is not original of Bogaards, but of Lewis who in 1993 already applies the concept of lexical unit in Lexical Approach. Lewis distinguishes between word as a formal unit, and lexical unity as a unit of meaning. For the author, in learning the L2 lexicon there may be different cases: learning an unknown form and a new meaning, learning a new meaning for a known form, learning a new meaning for a combination of known forms, learning semantic relations Between lexical units (synonymy, antonyms, etc.), learn morphological relationships between lexical units, learn correct uses of lexical units, learn the usual placements, learn appropriate pragmatic usage.

One of their contributions is that knowing a form does not mean knowing all its meanings and all the lexical units related to them. Therefore, lexical learning can not be focused from the point of view of learning forms, but from the perspective of meaning.

Learning new lexical units does not consist in learning new forms, often in learning new meanings and new relationships between one unit and others. This change is fundamental in the teaching of the lexicon.

Therefore, we can say of the lexical unit that is a word at least, is a semantic unit, the same form can be corresponded with different lexical units.

For Boogards (2010), a lexical unit is the union of a lexical form and a single sense. That is, there is no polysemy in the lexical unit since this is the union of a lexical form (one or more words) and a single meaning. In this way, it is easier to describe the stages of vocabulary acquisition. Although a student learns a form with a meaning, throughout their learning will learn that the same form has other meanings. Each formalized relationship will be a new lexical unit learned.

1.8 The learning of lexicon

One must make it clear that learning lexicon is an activity that never ends, the learner will always expand his lexicon, the lexicon can not be taught in its entirety, and not all methods are useful for all teaching situations.

But what do we mean when we talk about learning in general in an L2? What differences exist between L2 learning and L1 acquisition? Clark (1995: 266-267) analyzes the aspects in which acquisition and learning differ. The acquisition takes place in the context of the L1, the child always acquires, unless there is some kind of physical or psychic problem, successfully his mother tongue. However, most students in an L2 do not learn L2 equally successfully. Therefore, we quickly see that the acquisition only occurs in L1. There is a current, creative construction, which believes that successful learning of L2 can occur as long as it occurs in the same way as the acquisition of L1.

Clarifying the difference between learning and acquisition, we perfectly understand that the lexicon of an L2 is learned and not acquired.

But what is learning a lexical unit? Several authors consider that learning a lexical unit implies having a lot of information about it; to know its denotation, to have grammatical and functional information, to recognize it orally and in writing, to know its paradigmatic relations (relations with the lexical units that could appear in its place), its syntagmatic relations (relations with the rest of units with which it is combined), use it appropriately according to the communicative situation, have cultural information, connotative, metaphorical, etc.

Moudraia (2001: 48-49) marks the sub-learning that the learning of a lexical unit encompasses. We include them as they appear in their doctoral thesis:

recognize the lexical unit when you hear and know how to pronounce it,

recognize the written form of the lexical unit and be able to write it,

recognize the morphology of the lexical unit, that is, the morphemes that form it, relate those parts to their meaning, as well as being able to form the lexical unit using the correct morphemes,

recognize the different meanings or meanings and be able to produce the lexical unit to express its meaning according to the context,

recognize its grammatical category,

know the syntactic structures in which it can appear and its restrictions,

recognize and be able to produce other units with which it is related from the point of view of meaning (synonyms, antonyms, cohiponyms, hyperonyms, etc.) (paradigmatic relations)

recognizing and being able to produce the lexical units with other units with which they are typically combined ("placements", syntagmatic relations),

to know the pragmatic adequacy of a lexical unit to the situation or communicative context (depending on the place, the interlocutor, the intention, etc.)

know its frequency of use,

know what register belongs and use it in an appropriate situation,

know what cultural information transmits for a language community,

know if it belongs to some idiomatic or institutionalized expression,

recognize and know which units are restricted to oral or written speech,

know their equivalents in other languages

How can the teacher contribute all this information to the student? It is clear that all this content will appear gradually. Therefore, the learning of a lexical unit goes through different stages: comprehension, utilization, retention and fixation.

 Leithwood  (1992: 497-498) analyzes what the role of the teacher in relation to lexicon learning should be. It is not that the teacher provides a large number of lexical units. The teacher should be concerned with the following:

Learning should be student-centered, in its needs.

The learning has to be meaningful, the student has to process the input and relate it to the vocabulary already known.

The student must learn to deal with vocabulary autonomously thanks to the learning strategies provided by the teacher

First, the lexical unit is presented to the learner. Before the new lexical unit one can go from meaning to form or from form to meaning. There are several ways to go from form to meaning: show it with pictures or drawings, show it verbally with the definition, contextualize the word or translate it. Many authors consider that translating is wrong because it does not help the fixation of the word and it is necessary that the form-meaning relationship coincide in the two languages. What is clear is that this lexical unit can not appear only once, for the student to retain and fix it after it is necessary to repeat. The number of exposures to the lexical unit in question will depend on several factors: the student's memory capacity, motivation, degree of difficulty of the word, etc. Several works have shown that between 6 and 10 repetitions are sufficient. In addition, it is best that these repetitions are distributed over time.

But how does the L2 student learn a lexical unit? First, the form of a word must be recognized, and from that point on, connections between different types of knowledge are established, which allow us to relate a form to a meaning or to recover a form in order to express a concrete meaning. This process is complex and follows certain stages.

We have said that the first step is to establish a relationship between a form and a meaning, that is, to label meanings. Next, the lexicon must be reorganized, relationships are established between lexical units, and these relationships form a network. Therefore, it is clear that learning lexicon is to reorganize the lexicon.

Aitchison (2012: 46) establishes three sub-processes: labelling (establishing the connection between form-meaning-referent), packaging (discovering which meanings can be grouped under the same form), and networking (establishing relationships between lexical units).

1.9 Development and organization of the mental lexicon

One of the important questions concerning the lexicon is that of its organization: how is the mental lexicon of L2 developed and how is it organized? What is it like and how does it differ from the L1 lexicon? What unity Lexical is appropriate?

To understand the operation of the lexicon of the L2 it is fundamental to know the one of the L1 and to analyze the relations that are established between both. Therefore, we will first analyze the lexicon of L1 and then analyze the relationship established between the lexicon of L1 and that of L2.

Learning lexicon is not static, but a process, the important thing now is to analyze that process, analyze how it is organized. The vocabulary is not a list of words ordered alphabetically as they appear in a dictionary, it is fundamental to understand how they organize in the mind of a speaker, what structural relations are produced. As the lexicon is acquiring lexicon, its lexicon is expanded, the relationships established between lexical units are changing and expanding. The linguist must learn how this extensive network of relationships works.

It is demonstrated that the native speaker remembers the words as parts of networks, not as individual lexical units. Research in psycholinguistics proves this. Lexical associations are manifested in speech errors and aphasic disorders. The process of establishing partnerships is complex and dynamic as networks change throughout the procurement process. These connections can be based on form or meaning.

Thus, learning lexicon consists, as we pointed out in the previous section, in the creation and development of a mental lexicon. The concept of lexicon implies not only a set of lexical pieces, as we have said, but also the relations that are established between them. Aitchison (2010: 491-510) assumes that the mental lexicon is like a graphic complex whose nodes are lexical units connected to each other. At the beginning of the study of the lexicon it was believed that the network connections were established on habits (envelope / seal, moon / stars, etc.), but it was later shown that there are many types of relationships that speakers apply between Words: coordination (spoon-knife-fork), syntagmatic (navy blue / turquoise), hierarchical relations (tea-infusion), etc. The most important characteristics, according to Aitchison are the following:

The network is based on a system of associations that are different according to the author: phonetic, graphical, semantic, categorial, etc.

The network is dynamic, constantly evolving.

The number of associations of a word is variable.

There are established partnerships and personal associations.

On the other hand, for the generativist theoretical model, the mental lexicon seems to be endowed with a complex internal structure formed by a set of lexical elements that constitute the units of syntax. That is, the lexicon is not only composed of substantive or formant elements, but also by relational elements or rules. This model argues that the most frequent connection between lexical units is semantics (more than 50% in adults), compared to phonetics that is more frequent in children and in L2 learners (with 30%), .

From the study of the lexicon in L1 begins to study the acquisition of the lexicon in L2. The first studies that are done on this are based on the perspective of Universal Grammar. Everything studied in L1 lexical networks applies to L2 but there are differences. Meara (1984: 48) came to conclusions such as that association of words produced by non-native speakers are different from those produced by natives. The responses of L2 students are more varied, less homogeneous. Non-natives tend to make associations characteristic of children.

Therefore, the lexicon of L1 is different from the lexicon of L2. However, according to Kirsner (1993), these differences are diminishing as the learning of L2 increases. And according to Singleton (1999: 27), the organization of the mental lexicon of L1 and L2 is not different; the lexicon of L2 goes through different stages. What is clear is that the instability of the connections explains that the lexical access of the L2 is slow and requires effort. This instability must be reduced as the student progresses in the learning process.

Another theory about the acquisition of the lexicon in L2 is that of Semantic Equivalence, which proposes that the meanings of L1 are projected in L2 by giving two interrelated systems. This simplifies at the beginning the learning on the part of the student of the L2, since it is to be re-labelled the concepts that already exist in the L1. The problem is that in the long run it also generates confusion and complicates the learning of L2 since the signifiers are related to different meanings in each language, so that the semantic limits imposed by the student to a new signifier can be erroneous. We also find the added difficulty of false friends, words from different languages ​​that have similar signifiers. These false friends do not have to be in all contexts, they may share some meaning, but not all. Hence the student must bear this in mind, a meaning can not always be re-labelled. This is one of the difficulties of the lexical development of the L2, to learn to redefine the semantic limits of the signifiers. And not only this, one of the difficulties is also that not always a concept that in one language has a signifier, it has in another language. Each culture has different ways of labelling, sorting. Each language has different methods of word creation, there are agglutinating languages ​​like German and languages ​​that are not.

All this shows that the student always tries to make transfers from L1 to L2 and that sometimes this process will give a positive result, but at other times not. Therefore, the acquisition of the lexicon of L2 has as its starting point the L1. Appel and Muysken (2006: 43) considered to be important four types of transfer depending on whether it is positive or negative and whether it is of form or meaning.:

Positive transfer of form due to formal similarity between the two words. They are called cognates.

Negative transfer of the form of the word since the two words formally look alike but have different meanings. They are the false friends.

Positive transfer of meaning. The student learns a new tag and transfers the meaning of the word from the L1 to the word from L2. They are words of little use which present a relationship of practically total meaning.

Negative transfer of meaning. The student performs a total semantic transfer when only partial.

One of the problems with the L2 teacher is how to assess the development of the L2 lexicon. Meara (1980: 50) proposes dimensions, measure and structure. According to Meara, the lexicon as a whole must be valued. The dimension of measurement is to evaluate the development of the lexicon from the number of words that are known. The more vocabulary the student knows, the more effective will be in their communication. The dimension of structure measures the organization of the lexicon. The problem is that it is difficult to study the degree of organization of the lexicon, it is difficult to analyze it since the speaker is not aware of the connections between the lexical units.

CHAPTER II. METHODOLOGICAL PROPOSALS

2.1 Concepts of method and approach

The term method or approach will be constantly appearing in this study so it is practical to analyze what they are exactly. Richards and Rodgers (2001: 28) provide the definition already proposed by Edgard Anthony in 1963 and still useful: „One approach is a related set of assumptions regarding the nature of language teaching and learning. One approach is axiomatic, describing the nature of the subject taught”.

The method is a general plan for the orderly presentation of linguistic material, in which no part contradicts itself with others and all are based on a selected approach. The approach is axiomatic, while the method is procedural.

Richards and Rodgers (2001: 42) describe a method from the approach, design and Procedure. For Goodman (1986: 669-670) the method is understood as a coherent whole in which its components and elements revolve around three axes:

Axis 1: Component of the underlying principles and beliefs.

Axis 2: Component of the content (objectives), which flows from previous beliefs and principles and is based on them.

Axis 3: Component of the activities through which the selected content is put into practice (the procedures).

Gargallo (1999: 48-49) defines method and approach as follows: method is the term that in the Anglo-Saxon tradition is used to refer to the set of theoretical principles that base and justify the decisions that are made in the classroom to motivate and streamline the learning process (a concrete way of doing things in the English classroom). We also believe it pertinent to clarify that the term method also applies to manuals or textbooks oriented to teaching-learning of the language.

On the other hand, the term approach refers to the set of different theories about the nature of language and the different approaches to the process of learning / acquisition of a foreign language, in other words, refers to the theoretical component of the method. However, we also speak of a communicative approach and approach by tasks, denominations with which we refer to methodological proposals whose theoretical framework is interdisciplinary, in the sense that they integrate the contributions of different theories.

The definition is what we are going to take into account in this study. Therefore, the approach refers to theories about the nature of language and its learning, while the method is the level at which the theory is put into practice by deciding the content, the organization of this, objectives, etc. For us it is essential to clarify these concepts because in the contrastive analysis of the manuals we will analyze the approach and method on which each manual is based. We will try to demonstrate how the approach and the method influence a more or less productive lexicon teaching.

2.2 Evolution of the methodological proposals related to the lexicon

Throughout the last decades, the role given to the lexicon in the teaching of second languages ​​has been changing. In this section we briefly summarize the evolution of the lexical vision. Thus, for a long time it was considered that learning lexis consisted in learning a list of words without further ado and that this learning was always subordinated to that of grammar. Richards and Rodgers (2001) discuss different methods and approaches in second language teaching. On the other hand, regarding the development of lexical knowledge in second languages, Kroll, Michael, Tokowicz and Dufour (2002) study the evolution of lexical teaching. In this way, one will have an overview of the different methods used in the teaching of second languages ​​and a particular vision of the teaching of the lexicon.

Kroll et al. (2002) talks about 3 stages in the evolution of lexicon teaching. The first covers from the thirties to the seventies, is the stage of linguistic structures and lists of words; The second, from the 1970s to the publication in 1983 of Meara's Vocabulary in a Second Language, the stage leading to the revaluation of the lexicon; The third, from 1983 to the present, stage in which lexical learning is conceived as the qualitative development of the mental lexicon.

Kroll et al. (2002) explains that each of the three stages is characterized by the following elements: the linguistic theory to which it refers, the conception that one has at the moment of the lexicon, the conception of the learning process (what does it really involve to learn Lexicon: in an accumulation without more words, in the configuration of a structured mental lexicon?), and the teaching method that predominates.

2.3 First stage in lexicon teaching. Methodological proposals

The first stage, to which Kroll et al. (2002) refers, goes back to the 1970s and the linguistic theory of reference is structuralist linguistics. Structural linguistics is related to the teaching of languages through behaviourism. Behaviourism is a theory of learning based on a stimulus-response-reinforcement reaction. The basis of the structuralist method is the structure. Its basic characteristics are as follows (Harris, 1969: 12):

The linguist determines the structures of the L2 and orders them.

The student is gradually learning these grammatical structures.

Students, depending on where they are in learning structures, are classified into levels.

The linguist must analyze and classify the structures of the language and make many activities.

The linguist plays a fundamental role, not so much the teacher.

It is essential to develop material from which the student will repeat structures. The underlying idea is the stimulus-response mechanism of behaviourism. No grammar is taught explicitly, the student will acquire it in an inductive way, repeating structures exercises. Errors must be avoided as they may be internalized. A language is an independent system, so in teaching an L2 no reference can be made to the L1 of the student. This means that it can not be translated at any time. Although L1 can not appear in class, outside the classroom, the teacher must compare L1 and L2 in order to avoid errors that the L2 student will make due to L1 interference. This analysis is known as contrastive analysis. This contrastive analysis focuses on the study of interference.

One type of interference is that of the paronyms, cognates or false friends. The focus is on phonology and syntax because for structuralism language is a set of structures and this concept is not related to the lexicon. The lexicon is a secondary and peripheral element.

We will now analyze in greater depth the role of the lexicon in this first stage. We have already commented that the fundamental thing is to teach grammar and phonology. In the first stage of learning, the student should study a minimal lexicon since too much vocabulary can hinder the learning of grammatical structures. This minimal lexicon is learned by memorizing small lists of words, so it is not necessary to study the process of acquiring lexicon, since there is not, it is reduced to a mere rote exercise. Once the student has learned and assimilated the structural aspects, he can continue to study, memorize, vocabulary. This means that the first vocabulary taught is what the learner needs to learn grammatical structures. From there, the vocabulary is learned as it appears in classes. The teacher does not teach learning strategies to students or strategies to create new words.

The teaching methods according to Zimmerman, (1997) are the following:

Grammar Translation (Grammar-Translation Method). The characteristics of this method are (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 15-16): its objective is to learn a language to read its literature or to prepare the students to pass official exams; Reading and writing are basic; Prayer is the basic unit for learning a language; Emphasis is placed on correction; The grammar is worked in a deductive way; L2 is compared to L1; etc. The teaching of the lexicon, as we have already mentioned, is subordinated to the teaching of grammatical structures. The method of work is based on providing the student with bilingual lists of decontextualized words and teaching words that appear in the proposed examples when working syntax or phonology.

Reform Movement. This method arises as a response to the Grammar-Translation method. Some names of reformers are: Genry Sweet, Wilhelm Viëtor, Paul Passy. It appears at the end of the XIX. Its characteristics are as follows (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 20):

• oral language is essential;

• phonetic findings must be applied to L2 instruction;

• grammar must be taught inductively;

• translation must be rejected; etc.

But what interests us most is the lexicon; the textual unit begins to be valued, in such a way that it is tried not to de-contextualize the words but to study them within its context. Hence, one should avoid lists of isolated words.

Direct method. The Direct Method is the most widespread of natural methods. Through, among others, Maximilian Berlitz (1915). It became a well-known method in the United States and very popular in private schools, as the Berlitz that still uses this method. Its characteristics are as following ( Knight, 2001: 21-24):

• L2 is used exclusively in the classroom;

• grammar is taught in an inductive way;

• new elements are introduced orally;

• as to the lexicon, it is tried not to translate to the source language but to relate the new word to its meaning, using images and drawings.

Reading Method and Situational Language Teaching. It is the first time that the vocabulary is considered an important element in the learning of second languages. In this method importance is given to reading as a method of learning vocabulary and it is considered important to select the lexicon based on its frequency and level of learning.

Audio-linguistic method (audio-lingual, in English). The structures are repeated listening and speaking. The theory of the language on which it is based is the structural linguistics that we have already discussed. Followers of this method advocated a language-based language teaching. The important thing was to get an oral competition. Knight  (2001: 67-69): "In order to be able to do this, we need to be able to do the same”. The aim is to follow the behaviourist scheme: response-reinforcement stimulus. The student's role is passive, while the role of the teacher is central and active. The student should only repeat structures, respond to stimuli. The teacher sets the pace of learning, corrects the student, and controls the learning process.

All these methods have in common the emphasis on the teaching of grammatical structures, the subordination of the lexicon to grammar and the lack of lexical learning strategies.

2.4 Second stage in lexicon teaching. Methodological proposals

In the second stage, a revaluation of the lexicon begins. Since the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the evaluation of lexical teaching. Harmer (2007: 17) exemplifies it from a quote by Wilkins, 1972: "Without grammar you can communicate very little, without vocabulary you can not communicate anything."

Learning the lexicon begins to be understood as a dynamic process in which the learner must be actively involved.

Structuralist linguistic theory, as a theoretical basis, continues, but the influence of the ethnography of communication, generative grammar, and cognitive psychology is added. It is part of the idea that every student learns L2 as he learned his L1 as a child, that is, we have an innate mechanism that allows us to construct an internal grammar, and talk. The process is activated only after a period of exposure-language reception and external data processing. From there, the student builds his own L2 grammar and can creatively use the acquired knowledge. Therefore, it is important that the student is as long as possible in contact with L2 and that the teacher provides information about his / her grammar, comparisons between L1-L2, etc.

In this sense, the perspective is very different from the previous one. Let us remember that with structuralism, grammar should not be taught explicitly and no reference to L1 should appear. But they are not the only differences. It is fundamental to analyze how the error is now understood. Error is a fundamental part of the learning process. Let the student make mistakes.

In the first stage we saw that the contrastive analysis tried to predict the errors to avoid them, at this stage appears another method, the analysis of errors that considers that the important thing is to analyze the errors a posteriori. According to this vision the apprentice is constructing his own grammar that receives the name of inter-language. The inter-language is a grammatical system that creates the student, is an intermediate step between L1 and L2, includes rules of the two languages, and others that creates the student. The inter-language, in the beginning, has many elements of L1, but as the speaker progresses in the knowledge of L2, the interlanguage is approaching L2. Kellerman  (1984: 393) defines it as follows: Interlanguage (IL) is considered as the linguistic system of the non-native speaker in a certain stage of the learning process, which is constructed in a processual and creative way and is observable In linguistic performance. This system presents elements of the mother tongue, others of the target language and some exclusively idiosyncratic, as we can observe in the following oral interaction.

Thus, the analysis of errors studies that interlanguage that is manifested in the errors that the student commits. From the evolution of the interlanguage the teacher knows better the process of linguistic learning. Error, in this way, becomes a fundamental source of information.

It also introduces the concept of communicative competence that gives greater importance to pragmatic factors. This is fundamental since second language teaching will now be understood not as the teaching of structures but as the teaching of communication in another language. In addition, cognitivism emphasizes that syntax can not be separated from semantics or lexicon. A student of a second language can only use those structures and elements that he understands, hence the obvious relationship between semantics and syntax.

The teaching approaches in this stage are two, the communicative approach and the natural approach. The two are included in the section, "Current Communicative Approaches" by Richards and Rodgers (2001) along with Cooperative Learning of Language, Content-Based Instruction and Task-Based Language Teaching:

Communicative approach. It appeared in Great Britain in the late 1970s. It began to question that teaching an L2 was limited to knowledge of structures and it was felt necessary to focus on communicative competence. Some of its characteristics are the following (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 156-157): the most important thing is the meaning; learning a language is learning to communicate; Linguistic variation is an important concept; the main objective is fluency and mastery of the language; etc. It is essential that the student develops the four language skills: oral comprehension, written comprehension, oral production and written production. It is more important that communication is fluid to be accurate. Materials play a key role in promoting communication. Therefore, since communication is fundamental, activities are always contextualized, and focus on texts and tasks. It favours the appearance of "real" and "unadapted" texts.

Natural approach. It appeared in the late 1970s, specifically in 1977, Tracy Terrell, a professor in California, introduced it. Emphasis is placed on the need to expose students to understandable inputs. Emphasis is placed on exposure to language. It is important that the student is aware of the differences and similarities between his / her language and the language of learning, in order to find learning and production strategies. The materials must provide the extra-linguistic context necessary for the activities to be meaningful and must be real. As for the lexicon, its importance is emphasized since they consider that a language is essentially lexical. This approach is communicative, but it also gives importance to structures. It is an approach designed for the initial stage of learning a language. (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 175-176)

Focusing now on the lexicon, in this second stage comes the idea that teaching the structure of vocabulary facilitates learning. The learning process is complex and involves learning all the existing relationships between form and meaning.

Some authors believe that it is necessary to study the process of acquiring the lexicon of the first language to understand the processes of acquiring the second language. Others are raised if the learning of vocabulary is natural or if it is due to a learning process. Those who consider it natural give reading a very important role. For those who consider it unnatural, reading is not enough. At this stage we study how to present the lexicon to the learner, how to teach it.

There are three proposals:

The first is based on syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. Words must be learned within a context and by contrast. That is, the student needs to learn how a word relates to other words of similar meaning (paradigmatic relation) and with what words it can appear (syntagmatic relation).

The second is based on the decomposition of words in the components of meaning and the relationships between them.

The third is to structure the lexicon to facilitate learning. In the previous stage we found the method based on a list of high frequency words. At this stage, this method is questioned since the words that are used most often are those that have a low semantic content and the frequency depends on the corpus used.

This entails the appearance of different learning strategies since learning vocabulary stops being the memorization of a list of words of great frequency. It is considered that the important thing is to teach strategies to deduce the meaning of the words. It is no problem for the student to be imprecise, to use words of vague meaning and to paraphrase.

2.5 Third stage in the teaching of lexicon. Methodological proposals

The third stage begins in the mid-eighties and reaches the present time. Reference is made to the publication of the book by Meara (1983), Vocabulary in a second language. From this publication many others contribute to the development of the lexicon as a qualitative process and not only quantitative.

The linguistic theories of reference are the discourse analysis, the linguistics of the text and the pragmatics. In this sense, the concept of context is fundamental since depending on it, a word has one or another meaning. Textual linguistics focuses linguistic analysis on the text. It retains the term competence but is no longer a linguistic competence, but a communicative competence. Hymes (2003: 41) proposed the concept of communicative competence. He considered that language proficiency was insufficient because the statements should be appropriate to the context in which the communication takes place. This concept, which we already found in the previous stage, develops later. As we have already mentioned, it emerged in the mid-1970s, D.Hymes starts from the concept of Chomsky but adds that the speakers have skills that allow us to communicate in an efficient and appropriate manner in each context.

The fundamental idea that emerges from the communicative approach is that it is not enough to acquire a linguistic competence, but rather a communicative competence. That is, it is not enough for the student to construct correct sentences, but must be able to communicate and use those correct sentences in appropriate contexts. It addresses the four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. These four skills respond to two basic activities of the communicative act: decoding and coding, depending on the receiving role or speaker.

Textual linguistics generates a series of proposals for the teaching of L2 encompassed as a communicative approach. There are several methods, which we will analyze in greater depth than the previous ones as they are the ones that are totally in force, which follows this approach, but among others, one may consider:

The notional-functional method. It takes linguistic functions and speech acts as a starting point. Whiteman  (2013: 815-818) explains how this method arises. This method arises from the redefinition of the contents in the programming of L2. Its beginnings are related to the concept of speech act.

Through the language what is sought is the action, to be able to carry out actions. But the true development of this method or approach, as Matte defines it, occurs when being chosen by the Council of Europe to develop the project Modern Languages. The Council of Europe sought to define the objectives and contents of language courses and to describe them in documents specific to each language. In 1979, the Threshold Level, the specific document of English, was published. This document outlined the notions and functions that an FLE student should express. Matte discusses the advantages of this approach:

It reflects much better aspects of the spoken language.

Helps to learn to speak fluently and prepares for understanding.

Allows to better integrate the culture that is associated with different behaviours.

Attention to the uses of language gives us tools to understand the added meaning of statements.

The non-functional determination of the objectives and contents of the courses gives them greater flexibility.

Nonfunctional analysis opens up new perspectives for grammar.

It is the approach adopted by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (2002), CEFR from now on, as we will discuss below.

The method of work by tasks. It arose in the 80s. It is also based on the communicative approach. This method starts from the approach of the task as unit of organization of the program of the course. But what is a task? Richards and Rodgers define it as follows: A task is an activity or object that is performed using the language, such as finding a solution to a puzzle, reading a plan and giving instructions, calling, writing a letter or reading the instructions The assembly of a toy and follow them. (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 220)

Some of the ideas underlying Task-Based Teaching are as follows (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 222-225):

Language is primarily a means of creating meaning.

Task-based instruction is shaped by multiple language models: structural, functional and interactive.

"Conversation" is the fundamental priority of the language.

Tasks provide both input and output processing required for language acquisition.

Task execution activities are motivational.

Lexical units are essential in language use and learning. And this is, without a doubt, the idea that interests us the most. The lexicon acquires a fundamental role in this method.

Materials are essential in this method as they provide the tasks. Many of them are realia, authentic materials because they try to make the tasks are authentic.

The lexical approach. Several approaches are considered essential lexical units in teaching an L2. Some examples are The Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993), The Lexical Syllabus (Willis, 1990), and Lexical Phrases and Lenguage Teaching (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992) (J. C. Richards and T. S. Rodgers, 2001: 133).

The learning unit is no longer the word, it is the lexis. The lexical unit does not only include individual words, but also combinations that the speaker stores in his lexicon. These lexical units are minimal units of meaning. It is based on the idea that language consists of multiword segments that combined create text. Hearing comprehension is essential. It promotes horizontal or syntagmatic organization. The idea is to help the student to achieve verbal fluency thanks to the combination of segments. It is essential that the learner is given a lot of vocabulary. The teacher has to maintain a balance between words with a great semantic weight and words of little meaning. The predominant method will be that of tasks and skills. One of the objectives of the teacher must be to develop in students the ability to combine words. The lexical approach considers that there are units of multiple words that the speaker memorizes and that function as "blocks". There are few prayers spoken by a speaker that are new creations. Advocates of this approach study the distribution and placement of lexical units. They also contain grammatical information, syntactic information. The teaching is based on the observe-hypotype-experiment cycle and not on the previous one, present-practice-produce.

Focusing on exclusiveness in the lexicon we will begin by saying that at this stage a linguistic tendency begins to not distinguish between lexicon and grammar.

Learning of grammar is linked to lexical learning. Bogaards considers that grammar and lexicon are not independent.

The conception is the opposite to the one that had until then. They go from believing that the language is a set of syntactic structures in which the lexical elements are inserted to conceive the language like a set of lexical elements that need syntactic structures.

What is important now is to develop different lexical acquisition models. In this sense, we continue to study the acquisition of L1 to adapt these theories to the acquisition of L2. Emphasis is placed on the contrastive and interference analysis between L1 and L2 and on the need for the student to receive inputs, since words that appear more frequently in these inputs will be easier to acquire.

4 groups of teaching methods have been established (Coady, 1997: 31):

Learning from context. These methods consider that from a minimally understandable reading, one learns vocabulary, therefore, it is not necessary to study vocabulary.

Development of strategies. They consider that the context is fundamental, but that the student must confront only the text, for it is important to offer the student strategies for lexicon learning.

Explicit teaching. Each type of vocabulary must be taught explicitly from different techniques. One of them is the memorization of words that are frequently contextualized.

Learning based on classroom activities.

It is clear, after this brief analysis of the different stages that show the evolution of lexicon teaching, that, in recent years, linguistic theories have been giving an increasingly important role to the lexicon.

2.6 Current methodological approach

The current approaches are nothing more than a continuation of those already mentioned in the previous section. In this section we will only mention those already analyzed and comment on those that had not yet appeared in the previous stage.

At present no one doubts that the teaching of the lexicon should play a central role in L2 programming. In the previous section we have analyzed the different methods and approaches and how a gradual revaluation of the lexicon has taken place.

Richards and Renandya (2002) present 5 different methodologies, among which is his: methodology based on the association, natural approach, lexicometry, lexical approach and its own methodology. Some have already been commented on in the previous section, so we will not go into them in depth. Obviously they are not the only methods that we find at the moment, but they are those that focus primarily on the teaching of the lexicon:

1. The first is based on the association, a mental map (developed by Buzan). The association allows to register and to organize more information since it forces to use the two hemispheres of the brain: the left facilitates the codification and de-codification of the speech and the right processes the information, establishes associations and develops the creativity. This conceptual map can be used by the teacher as presentation of the lexical information that will work in the first units. The development of the association requires an intellectual effort and stimulates creativity. It is a very useful technique in the first levels that facilitates an autonomous learning.

2. The second methodology is based on the natural approach of Krashen and Terrell (2005: 500). This approach, as we have already mentioned, emphasizes the need for input, but an understandable input, since there is acquisition when one understands what one hears. With better understanding there will be more acquisition, but for better understanding, more vocabulary is needed. Hence the importance of providing input but bearing in mind that too much can confuse. Auditory understanding is emphasized and the emphasis of structural correction is diminished.

3. The third method comes from the lexicometry that considers the lexicon as an essential element in the programming of L2. Galisson in De la langue à la culture par les mots (1991) points out that there are three types of knowledge that the lexicon of L2 has to have the student: the concurrent ones that show the syntagmatic relations, the correlates, words of the same grammatical category which could be exchanged for this (paradigmatic axis), and collaterals, words of the same family as the word.

4. The fourth method is the lexical approach developed by Lewis in The Lexical Approach (1993) and in Implementing the Lexical Approach (1997) and has already been commented on.

5. The fifth methodology includes two levels: the one referred to the students and the one referred to the teachers. The student has to develop his own dictionary since the learning must be personalized and has to develop, with the help of the teacher, different learning strategies. The teacher should work the lexicon as a specific objective of programming. It must work systematically and there must be lexical planning, selection and gradation. Specific activities must be carried out to work on the lexicon, these should help the comprehension, retention and use of lexical units, as well as develop learning strategies that allow the learner to learn lexicon by itself. The didactic model has as its center the nuclear word of the text. The teacher must select a text and from there the nuclear word must be recognized. Richards and Renandya (2002) bet on using a realia, be it an advertisement, a news, a story, an interview, etc. From the word nuclear, each of the vertices is worked, although, as the author points out, not all nuclear words allow one to develop.

The method of Richards and Renandya (2002) is exhaustive and rigorous. The learner works systematically in the lexicon. We will see that none of the manuals can carry out a work of the lexicon of this type. It is the teacher who, based on the materials available, must carry out a study of the lexicon of this type. Of course, after working on a topic in this way, success in learning the new lexicon is practically assured. He practically always depends on the student, his motivation. There are several methods or approaches that prioritize the teaching of lexicon, or at least give it greater prominence.

CHAPTER III. CONTENT, PLANNING, PRACTICE AND DIDACTICS OF LEXICON

3.1 Lexicon content in the programming of English as Foreign Language (EFL)

This is one of the essential problems of the L2 teacher in general, which is the fundamental lexicon that a teacher should teach and how to program it. In this section we will see what kind of lexis we have and how it is organized according to different authors and according to the Common European Framework of Reference for languages: learning, teaching, evaluation (2002).

In all EFL programming, it is essential that a common basic lexicon for all students appears. This lexicon should be systematically worked in class with activities where you work exclusively. The student should be directed towards learning strategies so that he or she can independently learn lexicon: use of different types of dictionaries, derivation processes, composition, etc. The teacher should be concerned with the number of lexical units that the learner should understand and use, but also the use he can make of them, different communicative situations, different topics, etc. According to the Council of Europe, lexical competence consists of lexical elements and grammatical elements.

1. The grammatical elements form a closed vocabulary, a limited lexicon: determinants, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs. They are lexical units that play a relational and not a semantic function. Some authors consider that they are outside the lexicon and that, therefore, they must be studied from the grammar.

2. The lexical elements are classified in:

Open vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and closed lexical sets (days of the week, months of the year, measures, etc.).

Expressions made, composed of several words:

Formulas of social interaction and courtesy. Eg: greetings, presentations, farewells, thanks, etc.

Phraseological units. Example: idiomatic phrases of nominal type, verbal, etc.

Other idiomatic expressions.

Fixed sentence initiating structures. Ex: please, would you be so kind of …?

Other combinations consisting of words that are used together frequently. Eg: regime verbs (ashamed of …).

Obviously this is not the only possible classification of lexical units. Lewis, in The Lexical Approach (1993) proposes the following classification: words, poly-words, placements, fixed expressions and semi-fixed expressions.

A useful classification of lexical units when planning programming is the following:

1. Receptive vs. productive vocabulary. We must distinguish between active knowledge, those that can be used spontaneously, and passive knowledge, which are interpreted when presented.

2. Frequent vocabulary. It is the lexicon that is repeated most in a corpus. It is the most stable of a language. It is clear that this lexicon is important, it is related to the most useful lexicon, most profitable, but it is not enough as a criterion when establishing a fundamental lexicon.

3. Basic vocabulary. It is the set of words used in the communicative situations of everyday life. They are the most common and, like the frequent lexicon, are very stable.

4. Specific vocabulary. It consists of lexical units that are used in a particular domain. It is the lexicon of English for specific purposes.

5. Lexicon available. It is that the speaker can use immediately. It is the lexicon that is available and only appears when the subject of the speech allows it.

6. Basic lexicon. It is the lexical set formed by the basic and the available.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages ​​also establishes the elements that form part of the vocabulary. According to the common frame of reference, lexical competence consists of lexical elements and grammatical elements.

3.2 Lexicon planning in EFL programming

An important question is how much lexicon a learner should learn at each EFL level. Any EFL programming should plan the teaching of the lexicon.

In general, all lexical studies pick up the lexicon that is commonly used, although they classify it differently. The topics established, in accordance with the guidelines of the Council of Europe, are:

1. Personal identification: Name, surnames; address; phone number; sex; civil status; date and place of birth; legal documentation; language; nationality; profession; Physical appearance, character and mood.

2. House and accommodation: type, situation, dimension; Rooms, furniture and household linen; Installations and household appliances; repairs; rental; Accommodation in hotel, camping, etc.

3. Free time: hobbies; personal interests; sport; press; radio; TV; Intellectual and artistic activities (cinema, theatre, concerts, museums, exhibitions).

4. Travel and transportation: public and private transport; holidays; Travel documents; luggage.

5. Social relations: kinship; friendship; presentations; Social formulas (invitations, greetings, farewells, etc.); correspondence.

6. Health and fitness: parts of the body; hygiene; Sensory perceptions; Health states; diseases; Accidents; Medicines; medical services.

7. Shopping: stores; department store; prices; coin; weights and Measures; feeding; clothes; household items.

8. Food and drinks: gastronomy; Local food and drink.

9. Public service buildings: post office; phones; banks; police; Tourist information offices.

10. Time and climate: measure of time; the weather; meteorology; atmospheric phenomena; The flora

11. Communication problems: understanding; correction; clarification; negotiation; repetition; Rectifications.

One of the main ways of organizing the lexicon is from semantic fields that are inscribed in the context of a communicative situation within the different domains in which social life is organized.

The teacher will also try to include lexical elements of different grammatical categories: names, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, syntagmatic phrases, etc.

The EFL teacher should not worry about the fact that many lexical units appear since many will be occasional. The important thing is to be clear about the planned lexicon and to promote its meaningful and functional learning and to develop learning strategies in the student. He must also be clear that the materials and the way of working the lexicon are different according to the level in which the student is.

The teacher must work a limited number of lexical units per class or didactic unit or task. These lexical units are the planned lexicon. The Council of Europe in Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. The Common European Framework of Reference proposes different selection criteria for lexical units:

Select the key lexical units (words and phrases) in the thematic areas necessary to perfect the students' communicative tasks. In order to select these lexical units, the criterion of frequency of use and of the efficiency of the lexical unit is taken into account.

To take into account, practically exclusively the criterion of frequency of use and to teach the words of greater frequency. This criterion has been and is criticized by many authors.

Select authentic oral and written texts and work with the lexical units that appear. Therefore, it is important to select the texts that are to be worked well.

Do not plan lexical development and provide the student with the lexical units that are needed to carry out their communicative tasks. In this way, the learner is given, above all, receptive vocabulary and not so much, productive vocabulary.

The selection of lexical units should be balanced in terms of the number of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and expressions made. At the initial level, one way to select vocabulary is from conceptual maps of specific subject areas. For this, it is useful to consult ideological dictionaries, thematic, frequencies and phraseological materials.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages ​​(Council of Europe, 2002: 149-150) gives a number of options to those who develop test materials and manuals for lexical selection:

Choose key words and phrases: in thematic areas necessary for the achievement of communicative tasks appropriate to the needs of students. They embody the cultural difference of the group whose language is being taught.

Follow lexical-statistical principles that select the most frequent words or words that are used for thematic areas delimited.

Choose authentic spoken and written texts and teach all the words they contain.

Do not pre-plan the development of vocabulary, but allow it to develop organically.

But how should the lexicon be organized? This is presented gradually to the student. Thematic areas may reappear as the student progresses to expand the vocabulary. What seems clear is that in the first place the most general lexicon, then the more technical lexicon, and, lastly, the less frequent lexicon, must be taught first.

In the acquisition of EFL three stages are established in the production, above all, of the vocabulary:

Identification stage: the student is able to describe himself, his family, talk about his friends, his house, etc.;

Stage of the experiences: the student can talk about many experiences – vacations, studies, work, plans, daily life and so on;

Stage of opinions: the student can talk about political, social, current affairs, etc.

From what has been exposed so far, it seems clear that the teacher:

A) should plan the teaching of the lexicon, especially that of the planned lexicon,

B) should not be worried because too occasional lexicon appeared,

C) should start teaching general and high frequency lexicon,

D) should balance the teaching of different grammatical categories (names, e) adjectives, verbs, adverbs, syntagmatic locutions, etc.)

E) should use real texts, especially at intermediate and advanced levels,

F) should use concept maps, especially at the initial level, etc.

But it is evident that throughout the teaching-learning process, the teacher must be able to evaluate the acquisition of that lexicon. It has to be evaluated: comprehension (recognition, passive vocabulary), production and retention (availability of that lexicon).

3.3 Strategies for learning vocabulary based on the functioning of the mental lexicon

Although many details remain to be solved with regard to the mental representation of linguistic information in both a monolingual and a bilingual individual, there is a basic data that has very clear repercussions on the learning of a foreign language: the fact that The organization of concepts in our brain is based on interconnection and that the meaning of the elements is defined by their multiple relationships with other concepts. It follows that the more closely related a concept to other concepts of various kinds, the more easily it can be activated. For the acquisition of vocabulary in a foreign language, this means that retention and access to words will be better if during learning:

multiple connections are established with other words,

structure information (establishing different types of relationships),

involve various senses (see, hear, etc.) or presentation formats of information (text, images).

In this last point, one must take into account that not all the apprentices use with equal efficiency the different senses. Different types of trainees have been described depending on the sensory channel that they find most important for learning. In this way, the visual, auditory, haptic and olfactory types have been distinguished. Without a doubt, this is a simplification and in reality we all use a combination of several styles (with some preference for some). However, it is a further argument to try to provide the student with information that appeals to several of his senses and, in addition, not only to his cognitive abilities but also to his emotional capacity, since emotions have been shown to be a powerful activator of the memory.

3.4 Learning the vocabulary in context: Working with placements and concordances

A growing number of authors (Lewis, 1993, 1997, Nation and Newton, 1997; Hoey, 2000 a and Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 2001) take into account the placement (or co-occurrence) aspect and Vocabulary whose purpose is to increase the awareness of learners regarding the probability that words appear in the company of certain other words. Nation (2001: 336-342), for example, suggests the promotion of chunking (awareness and use of placements in the broadest sense of the word). Also in this context we find the distinction between tasks aimed at increasing fluidity on the one hand and wealth on the other. The first ones include activities of rapid and extensive reading as well as oral exercises that force the memorization of segments, such as reading sentences by looking up from the paper, reading a sentence to copy without looking again, etc. The aim of activities of the second type, on the other hand, is mainly to orient the attention of the trainees to the functioning of the language through the analysis of concordances (data-driven learning, vid. mainly, Johns and King , 1991; Johns, 2002). From the methodological point of view, in the use of electronic corpus for teaching foreign languages ​​we find very different approaches that go from the use of data extracted from corpus that allow an inductive, but controlled and teacher-led learning (such as the proposals of Johns, 1994, for example) to activities aimed at promoting autonomy. Among the latter we can find the free search for linguistic information (Bernardini, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004).

Although it has been shown that the analysis of concordances by the students is effective for the learning of vocabulary (Cobb, 1997), in the didactic applications usually the grammatical aspects prevail. This is probably because it is relatively easy to deduce grammatical regularity from a small number of examples. On the other hand, the proposals related to the vocabulary do not abound, possibly because it is much more difficult to extract semantic information from a list of concordances. For this reason we want to propose an activity that illustrates the use of corpus as a tool for vocabulary acquisition.

3.5 The role of literature in English lexicon teaching and learning

Commonly accepted, the lexical component of every language plays an essential role both in the production and reception of oral and written texts, from the first contacts with the mother tongue (L1) and the target language (Yum, 2014: 364). Regarding the language in question, English, the disparity or lack of correspondence between the graphic and phonological level of words is one of the difficulties that makes this learning process an arduous task. To this reality is added the fact that, despite the growing implementation of the communicative approach in the teaching of foreign languages, the method that still remains for lexicon learning is based on lists of vocabulary, ordered alphabetically and grouped by thematic units (Oster, 2009: 33).

The virtues of literature as a further resource for language learning have already been widely reported in a large number of works (Savvidou, 2004, Lazar, 2008, Violetta, 2015). Firstly, the particular attention given by literature to the formal level of language and its deviation from everyday language, which seeks the transmission of content without repairing both the auditory or formal quality of words, allows the incipient to examine in detail Language features as new vocabulary (or not previously found with the same meaning), syntactic structures, discursive markers, or different ways of connecting ideas, among others. All this, in turn, helps to enrich their expressive resources, when producing texts, and their ability to infer meaning from new words from a sufficiently explanatory context (Collie & Slater, 2004, p. 8).

Second, literature constitutes authentic language-in-use material, which provides contextualised contextual situations as well as real interaction patterns (eg, novels, short stories, or plays). This can motivate students through their mental and affective identification with what they are reading. Likewise, reading a text may lead to debates of interest to the class, and their contribution to it will require, in a less forced way for the incipient than with other activities, to familiarize themselves with the vocabulary used in the text and be able to extract their key ideas.

The development of critical appreciation of texts is closely linked to the concept of "literary competence" (Culler, 1975). Culler indicates that readers have an implicit knowledge of certain conventions that allow them to interpret words on paper and confer them a "literary meaning", beyond the merely literal. This ability is especially useful not only in the classroom of English as a foreign language, but also in those subjects that use literature not as a means to study the language, but as curricular content itself.

For all this, literature seems to us an ideal resource for its integration into the classroom of English as a foreign language, especially for the acquisition of lexicon. According to some authors (Paribakht & Wesche (1997), Huckin & Coady (1999)), a large part of the vocabulary learned by the students is acquired through reading for pleasure (or extensive learning), and formal instruction plays a relatively insignificant function with respect to the total computation of words learned. It is, therefore, "incidental learning" or "informal" that makes the acquisition of lexical material more possible through written and oral texts. However, such learning has its drawbacks, including "lack of control over what is learned, time taken to make inferences, and the fact that inferences often contain errors that, if not specifically addressed, can be fossilized" (Pardillos et al., 2013: 1619).

To avoid such disadvantages, continuous support in the classroom, through exercises and explicit comment of words that may be ambiguous or create problems of compression, is essential. According to Nation (2001), ”learning a word is a cumulative process. We can not expect a word to be learned in one meeting and we need to see each meeting as a small contribution to learning. Learning a word occurs across a range of different learning conditions; […] those conditions should involve roughly equal proportions of the four strands of meaning-focused input, language-focused input, meaning-focused output and fluency development.” (Nation, 2001: 296)

For this reason, it is necessary to develop strategies and exercises oriented, on the one hand, to the development of the flow (or deep level of processing, using the terminology Sökmen (1997)), to facilitate a relatively fast recovery of the word recently incorporated to the lexicon Mental and, on the other hand, wealth, with the aim of enriching the morpho-semantic and textual associations between them. Within the aforementioned strategies for acquiring vocabulary based on the mental lexical repertoire, it is important to emphasize the interconnection that is established both between lexis among themselves and between signifiers and meanings. In relation to the learning of lexical units in a foreign language, these relationships can be created and reinforced through different methods of vocabulary presentation and the use of several sensorial channels, such as auditory and visual (Oster: 39). While not all students use different channels of perception in the same way, combining several of them, especially if they appeal to emotions, can improve lexical storage both in the short and long term.

In this line, the present study has used the iconic or phono-symbolic principle of languages, which postulates the analogy between form and meaning of the linguistic sign despite the apparent arbitrariness of the linguistic sign that structural Linguistics defends. Ullman (1962) defines "phono-simbolism" (also known as "secondary onomatopoeia") as a capacity for "sounds [to evoke] not an acoustic category, but a movement – or some physical or moral quality , usually unfavourable. Thus, we allude to those words whose sounds bring to mind certain ideas or sensations.

Unlike the onomatopoeia, which pretends to reproduce a sound found in the extra-linguistic world (such as murmur, crash or flash) directly, the phono-symbolic word creates a more complex cognitive association, because in many occasions the concepts that are evoked Are non-sound concepts that imply a greater abstraction on the part of the speaker. In these lexis, phonetic motivation allows us to establish a correlation between signifiers and meanings, as shown by Firth (1957) in his study of the consonant group "sl": sly, sloth, sleepy, slime or slug are semantically charged with pejorative connotations To a greater or lesser extent, associated mainly with what Firth (1957) called the "sl". However, he argues that there is nothing inherently negative about sound, but rather cumulative suggestive connotations.

The mechanistic conception of Firth points to that the phoneme is a phonetic habit rather than a result of a semantic association carried out by sonic symbolism. This linguistic approach, rooted in the ideas of speech as habit and the behaviourist theory of response and stimulation, does not contemplate the fact that sometimes the onomatopoeic or mimetic sense evoked by certain words is unrelated to the prototypical phoneme, due to the free cognitive association of the human being. This creative capacity is especially used by writers who often resort to the identification of form and meaning in order to maximize the pluri-signification of their literary works (Fischer, 1997).

CHAPTER IV.

LANGUAGE TEACHING FROM DIFFERENT APPROACHES

4.1 Language teaching from a lexical approach

From the position of linguistic education professionals, it is our responsibility to provide the students of compulsory secondary education with the necessary resources to produce and understand texts of different linguistic complexity; or what is the same, that they possess the sufficient communicative competence to cover satisfactorily the different discursive situations that life comes to them. To that end, our methodological proposal is based on a process that begins by incorporating new words into the students' mental lexicon by understanding and exercising the new vocabulary extracted from a context: the written text. For this process it is necessary to perform tasks and exercises of writing and oral expression to ensure the memorization of the new vocabulary, while practicing the four basic skills of the language: production and oral and written reception.

This lexical and globalizing approach is guided by Mattys and Jamie (2008), as following: "Recognizing the importance of semantics and putting it as a starting point rather than a point of arrival is something that has never been done by influence Of traditional grammar, which, as we know, relegated the semantic plane and accorded the highest priority to grammar (morphology and syntax), over the first. This measure has obviously benefited the teaching of the mother tongue and today the specialists are constantly insisting on the great importance of the lexico-semantic plane. "

Next, one may observe the working method that starts with an initial text (as one may see it below), and then vocabulary exercises through complementary lexical typologies.

Shaking hands

Shaking hands is a gesture whose origins go back to the man from the caves. It seems that when two cavemen met, they had to keep their arms raised, showing the palms of their hands to prove that they were not armed or, if they were, to signify their will to non-aggression.

This gesture was modified over the centuries, adopting new variations: the hands raised, the palm of the hand over the heart, the two palms of the hands in front of the chest, and innumerable others. In Western cultures this ritual gesture has taken the form of shaking hands and shaking it three or four times. It is typical gesture of initial greeting or farewell. But beyond the mere fact of greeting, the handshake gives us a first information about our interlocutor. There are some concrete ways of shaking hands, so that you can establish some styles, each of them with constant characteristics. The interpretation of a particular handshake is usually based on criteria of sensitivity, and then, we usually transfer this appreciation to the intellectual or moral level. (Motos et al., 1997: 10)

Approach to text

Once we read the document aloud, we unravelled the meaning of the unusual and unknown words, as well as the overall meaning of the text. This task will be carried out through the pedagogical dialogue with the students. For this we can ask them to summarize the content of the text and to propose other titles that synthesize the information.

Next, we will write the passive vocabulary (voices unknown to the students), the potential vocabulary (words they know or have heard but do not use), and some terms of the active vocabulary (words commonly used for them). Our didactic work will be directed to the passive vocabulary being transferred to the potential, and that the latter becomes active. For this we have a wide range of lexical strategies, among which should never lack reinforcement activities. This was the result of the selection made for Table 1:

Then we begin a brief linguistic commentary on some of the words appearing there. They are quick semantic, morphological or orthographic observations. For example, from the term "innumerable" we can explain the presence of the prefix in- in the formation of the English lexicon; or to reason the use of the tilde; Or to present two meanings for the polysemic word "go back".

Lexical proposals

The didactic possibilities of working the vocabulary are very numerous. For this occasion we have selected exercises corresponding to four of the lexical typologies presented by Wolf (1984). They are complementary activities, so that their varied and regular use are an effective guarantee of acquisition. On the other hand, some of these proposals are not closed, and could appear in several of the following sections: conventional activities, playful, constellations and dramatization.

Conventional activities

With such designation one grouped those exercises of vocabulary more aided by the school tradition. To do so, it would be sufficient to approach the textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s, or other publications. They are usually exercises of individual resolution, little contextualized and somewhat mechanical. With regard to the selected vocabulary, we propose the following sample as an orientation:

Classify the vocabulary according to the class of words or parts of the sentence.

Relate words to their definition.

Sorts that list alphabetically.

Establish derivations (lexical families).

Name other words that belong to semantic fields of selected vocabulary.

Indicates synonyms for "trace" and "modified".

Points to an antonym for "moral" and "western".

Write a sentence with each of the following terms: "ritual", "gesture" and "gesture".

Search for two polysemic words and write the different lexical entries that you offer

Dictionary.

Playful activities

As in the previous block, these exercises also present little contextualization, but in many cases they favour the game and the cooperative component. A good example of this can be found in Keating (1978), Trawick-Smith (1994), Frost, Sue and Robert (2008). Here are some examples:

• Select ten words (from table 2) and compose a letter. Interchange it with your companion.

• Same as before but now it's about inventing a crossword puzzle.

• Form crosswords.

• Create advertising and colour phrases.

• Form other words with the letters of a word.

• Listening only as an answer, yes or no, guess what the hidden word is.

• Build an acrostic.

• Plasma with a drawing one of the words (pictogram).

Activities with constellations

Lexical constellations are a manifestation of applied and structural linguistics. In fact, the vocabulary is not made up of isolated lexical pieces, but rather on the contrary: networks, constellations of linguistic relations motivated mainly by the links of association (phonics and semantics), synonymy, antonyms, composition and derivation. In addition, this network of interconnected words manifests in some way the mental and lexical map of school children, and is a good resource to explore the vocabulary of subjects. (Bell, 2008:52) This strategy is based on producing words from an input word for five or ten minutes, or when we occupy the surface of the paper (leaf or foliage). The words are emerging from the five linguistic relations pointed out above. The task can be solved in small groups of four or five students, or jointly by the classroom group on the board, with the corresponding teaching support. By way of example we are going to suppose that we choose the voice "gesture", this will be the generator word of the lexical constellation outlined. To visualize the category of the voices that appear, we will capitalize the NAMES, lowercase and underscore the verbs, and lower case the adjectives; That is, we will only reflect these three kinds of words by being full or round semantically.

In turn, with this vocabulary emerged from the constellation, we can give way to writing tasks where contextualize the vocabulary: write a postcard, a brief news story, an advertisement for an advertising poster, a mini story according to the technique of Fantastic binomial (two terms chosen at random), from "I'm sick or tired of …" or "it bothers me that …" continues to write your reasons or reasons for that situation. For these or other writing proposals we will ask the students to use words collected by the constellation. But the same thing we can ask for with oral expressions: a mini lecture (one or two minutes), a personal memory, a trip, an anecdote that suggests the vocabulary mentioned, or we can ask that in groups of four people, A small episode or story for four minutes (4 x 4), or simulate the interview to a famous person, or a newscast with school news. With these tasks of written and oral production we work the vocabulary around themes or centers of interest, a fact that favours the incorporation of the new words into the personal lexicon. (Ballmer and Brennstuhl, 2013:85)

Drama Activities

Within this regard, we intend to integrate the vocabulary in verbal and non-verbal language, a situation that already occurred in some of the proposals in the previous section. Here students should put into practice the communicative skills to solve different situations. In order to do so, they will simultaneously exercise such important aspects of the person as are the intellectual, imaginative, motor and affective levels, since they must interact in a virtual situation. (Thurman and Piggins, 2014:36)

To begin and return to the initial text (Table 1), we will ask you to reflect and write briefly a day in the life of the caveman, or to describe the situation outlined in the document (greetings), trying to personalize what is Say (name people and places). This task will serve as introspection and contact with the topic or topic of the didactic unit.

Afterwards, we will propose some start-up games to generate in the classroom a playful and imaginative environment that helps to partially unblock the logical inhibitions of the subjects. It is about preparing the mind, the voice and the body, to preheat before entering fully into a subsequent simulation activity. Vocalizations games with some of the words in table 2 (explore the tone, timbre, intensity, rhythm, pronounce only vowels, change the accentuation of the word, etc.); games of body expression such as imaginatively writing some of the words on the floor, on the ceiling, vertical, with the foot, on a slippery surface, with spray, with fine brush, etc. In order to carry out these activities, we must modify the layout of the furniture, such as stacking the desks at one end of the classroom.

Then, in small groups of two or three people, they should mimic some of the words assigned by the teacher or chosen at random and the other members of the group will have to guess them. In the next activity we introduce the oral language, since they have to improvise with different dialogues and actions (one or two minutes) different styles of shaking hands (like a dead fish, like a hard type, with rigid arm, etc.), or of greeting oneself, always with the conditioner to use some of the words of the lexical selection.

Finally, we can also propose to represent a conflictive situation suggested by the vocabulary, for which we will have to establish minimally an argument, a theme, a conflict, characters, a time and a place. In addition, the topic of the hand gives much of itself in the phraseology, because if we look at the dictionary we will check the wide repertoire of possibilities: "hands full", "reach the hands", "lend a hand", "Hands "," ask for hand "," hand to hand "," hand of saint ", etc. Some of these phrases may be the embryo of a small representation; But we can also collect many of them and request that they phrase the phraseology in small groups of two or three schoolchildren with the presence of passive and potential vocabulary. For all this the orientations of Kuimova, Valeryevna and Gaberling (2014:352) are very useful.

With these tight pages we wanted to offer a sample of the didactic possibilities offered by teaching and learning language from the lexical approach in Compulsory Secondary Education. In fact, the repeated use of the new words is the necessary reinforcement for the memorization of the vocabulary. Thus, if we expand the lexical baggage of schoolchildren we enable them to communicate with greater precision, ownership and clarity; while favouring mental processes as important as the ordering, relating, qualifying and classifying individual and extra personal reality, a task for which it is essential to have a broad vocabulary.

4.2 The development of the vocabulary from the perspective of texts understanding

Understanding the role of oral language and its development, giving due importance to activities related to the expansion of vocabulary are valuable tasks that should lead, without doubt, to obtain a quality language learning. The point is not to reject certain expressions, but to teach students when, at what moment, with what intention, with whom they can use turns or other, that is, to ensure the widening of the linguistic universe of students.

Although in vocabulary poverty there are factors of a socio-cultural and linguistic nature, which reflect what has been known as the speaker's knowledge framework, the teacher does not offer a comprehensive treatment of this phenomenon that has a direct impact on comprehension-production textual. In this framework, the lexical element that is distinguished by its semantic autonomy seems to demand special attention. Linguists and pedagogues face a complex problem: the study of the lexical aspect of the language, towards which there has been an approach, thanks to the communicative approach.

In this respect, few, but very valuable have been the investigations developed around the theme of the vocabulary. Thus, the studies carried out by Lic. Miyares, Eloína (2006) on the active-functional lexicon of the Cuban school are revealed, a research that only quantifies the number of words that students use in their active vocabulary and not their didactic treatment. The recommendations given by Turner Martí (1988) have also been taken into account in the text: How to extend communication in children in rural areas, in which the author proposes different exercises to expand the vocabulary of schoolchildren in these areas.

It is considered significant that Dr. Machado, Teresa (1999) in her doctoral thesis, summarizes the shortcomings currently presented by the work with vocabulary and how this is reduced to a mechanical analysis of a set of words of unknown meanings. It is of the criterion that this, of course, should not be the didactic treatment that receives this content.

Also, Franco Noa (2008:300) offers a methodological alternative for the development of vocabulary contextualized to the second cycle of primary school.

As revealed in the previous analysis, none of these investigations has entered into the initial training of the primary teacher, however, in this context, through the pedagogical practice and the observations to the teaching-learning process, different revealed in:

The contents related to the development of the vocabulary, such as synonyms and antonyms, procedures for the formation of new words, do not receive a systematic treatment by the teachers who work in the 1 year of the Degree in Primary Education (LEP).

The poverty of students' vocabulary prevents success in working with reading, speaking and writing.

In the students' discourse we can see digressions, use of so-called "muletillas"; even, they use the silence in many occasions in which they do not have words.

The algorithm that follows for the comprehension of texts; Is not revealed as one of the avenues for the development of vocabulary.

4.3 Understanding texts. A way to work with vocabulary

Considering language as a means of social communication can not be lost sight of in the analysis of linguistic facts, that these occur in situations in which men interact, which means choosing the lexical and grammatical means most appropriate to their intention and Purpose. From the above, it follows that in order to achieve effectiveness in the teaching of language, the analysis of such facts should be encouraged. This also means placing the student in more complex communicative situations and facing the textual diversity to appreciate the different functional styles.

The teaching of text comprehension and, in particular, vocabulary in psycho-pedagogy is based on the historical-cultural approach and meaningful learning. It implements ideas of Vigotsky and his followers, as well as it is based on the pedagogical principles of the scientificity, the systematicity and the affordability.

With emphasis on the Vygotskian conception, he focuses his interest in the integral development of the personality because it is this that communicates and learns in an interpersonal, social context. It takes into account the active nature of psychic processes and the social character of human activity, and considers language as a system of signs that participates in communication and cognition, which occur in socio-cultural activity; thus establishes the interrelation between personality, communication and activity.

It understands learning as an interactive, dialectical process in which the student's knowledge, experience and experiences take part as an active, unrepeatable, social and protagonist subject in which changes occur in his / her activity, taking into account the Law of mediation and emphasizes in the area of ​​potential or future development, in the relation between thought and language, in the unity of content and form and in practice as a constructive principle of science (Vigotsky, 1987).

Vigostky considers that the human beings are developed in a given historical-cultural formation, created by the own human activity in which the development of the psychic processes takes place and the consequent appropriation of the culture, reason why the human activity is always social and It implies, therefore, the relation with other people, the communication with others that arises in the spiritual world of each one, its personality.

From the philosophical point of view, it is based on the relation between thought and language and sees language as an essential means of human cognition and communication, which makes the philosophical conception interrelated with the historical-cultural approach and its criteria on the development of Psychics and language functions, considered by Vygotsky as the central function of social relations and cultivated behaviour of the personality, which in turn fulfils two essential functions: intellectual and social. Reasons for which he considers as guiding ideas:

• Language as an essential means of human cognition and communication.

• The dialectical unity of content and language form and its dependence on the context in which it is used.

As a didactic foundation, it is assumed that it is related to the developmental learning (Leung et al., 2013:97), which refers that the effectiveness of the teaching learning process is appreciated when it becomes an active process, linked to life, developer of intelligence, which contributes To the formation of positive qualities and values ​​of the personality.

In this respect, the process of text comprehension must become a dynamic interaction between the students and the text and of the students, integrating actions directed at instruction, development and education, all of which respond to the different teaching principles (Addine, 1999) and UNESCO's postulates of learning to know, learn to do, learn to be and to live together that show the object and purpose of education that the current century demands.

In order to achieve the integral formation the student must have an active and conscious participation during the process of textual comprehension, he must reflect and learn to regulate his ways of thinking, of feeling and of performing; To build their meanings, to respect the construction of the meanings of the rest of the students with responsibility and self-regulation, so that learning in group conditions is effective.

The understanding of texts should estimate as a linguistic support the cognitive, communicative and socio-cultural approach; which is "a theoretical construction, a result of the complex process of development of the new linguistic conceptions that focus their attention on the discourse and processes of understanding and production of meanings" (Lantolf, Thorne, and Poehner, 2015: 207-226). However, despite the need of the application of this new approach, there are still insufficiencies to direct the process of teaching-learning from this new perspective.

This allows us to reiterate that, at present, it is necessary to apply a cognitive-communicative and socio-cultural approach to language teaching, involving both language teachers and all subjects in general, taking into account Consideration the role that corresponds to each one in the socio-cultural development of its students with interdisciplinary character and as the author mentioned before.

In order to achieve this goal, Miller (2014: 98) aptly designated the term cognitive, communicative and socio-cultural approach to refer to his conception of language teaching in the current context of the development of science. It considers that this way for the teaching of the language must be framed in a linguistic centred on the meaning and the text. If this approach is properly applied, the student's cognitive, communicative and socio-cultural competence will be achieved, that is, he is prepared to use language appropriately in any communicative situation.

As a result, the proper application of this approach will favour the development of the skills of comprehension of texts in different styles, both orally and in writing, and make it possible to appropriate the expressive patterns that characterize the cultured use of language. The understanding of the text, from the cognitive-communicative and socio-cultural perspective, will be achieved to the extent that the student becomes an efficient communicator. This supposes:

Understand what others try to mean in different contexts, understanding as an individual, original and creative act.

Possess a linguistic – literary culture, which allows the discovery of the linguistic resources used by the sender in the construction of meanings, depending on the communication.

Demonstrate, according to the demands of the communicative context in which it is, an effective use of the linguistic means necessary to express the comprehension of the text.

If this is concretized, it will be consistent with what was proposed by Miller (2014) that "from a didactic of the language has been moved towards a didactics of speech", which focuses on the problem of communication, for example, achieving that students become efficient communicators, able to understand and construct texts in a coherent way, depending on the communicative needs that are presented to them and in which they will interact.

In correspondence with these purposes the contemporary conceptions about reading coincide in pointing out that reading comprehension is the raison d'être of this process, in which cognitive activity is constituted fundamentally by the processing of prior knowledge activated in the reader by the text .

If it is accepted that reading is not limited only to the acquisition of the technique, since reading is to understand, to react intelligently to the content read, it is necessary to specify what is to understand.

Understanding (an idea) is considered by many authors synonymous to understand, to penetrate, to conceive, to discern, to decipher.

In this manner, understanding, and especially of the written text, reaffirms its guiding nature in the acquisition and development of the mother tongue, and reading is a key element for its mastery because "language codes are fixed by visual memory and Necessarily when reading also develops the work with the concepts "(Parra, M., 1992). Reading is considered to be the linguistic ability to receive a message from a source (writer), to understand and react to it.

According to the above, it means remembering something known and referring or associating the new with what was previously acquired; therefore, in order to arrive at an understanding of something, the support of previously acquired knowledge or experience is essential, on that basis, to emphasize the essential of the new knowledge or the new experience and relate it to the above.

Understanding involves the reconstruction of meanings by the reader, who through the execution of mental operations, tries to give meaning to the elements that have previously served to access the text. This processing is dynamic, it is done when the reader establishes the coherent connections between the knowledge (frame of reference) that he has in his cognitive structures and the new ones provided by the text. The reader can not exchange directly with the sender, has to penetrate the socio-cultural world of the author, assume his position to establish inter-textual, intra-textual and supra-textual connections.

The MSc Valiente (2003) states: "Understanding is only achieved to the extent that the recipient of a text (reader or listener) perceives its phonological structure, discovers the meaning of the words and the syntactic relationships that exist between them and (re) constructs meaning according to its "universe of knowledge", which shows its dependence on analysis and construction; in this respect, in order to understand a text it is necessary to analyze and construct meanings and will do it with greater success the one that has more knowledge (universe of the knowledge), as much on the referent (reality), as on the linguistic means (phonics, lexicons and grammar) used by the author to mean ".

In this respect it is inferred that the understanding of the text is concretized when the reader manages to integrate the individual ideas in a global way, in order to arrive at the essence of meaning and its expression in a synthesized way.

In order to achieve text comprehension, different methodologies have been introduced, including Britton and Graesser (2014) in which points of contact with the one suggested by Miller (2014) are appreciated. The first considers the following steps:

1.- Reading (one or more times) of the text. It requires concentration and effort to penetrate its meaning. Silent (impressive) and oral-expressive modalities can be combined. The reader should turn back if he perceives that something escapes him. In this respect, the text should reflect on what has remained in it of its content or message.

2.- Work with the lexical unknowns or search of the contextual meaning. During reading, especially that of the students, that "something that escapes" is usually given by those words or groups of words that prevent progress and are like stones that make difficult the entrance to the textual sense, that's why we have called them Thus: lexical unknowns. It is about knowing what they mean there, their influence and that they exert on the words that surround him or those that we do not know. It will have to proceed from the text-to the dictionary-to the context again, like when a piece of a puzzle is placed in its place. If it happens that the unknown word coincides with a keyword, without "clearing" it will become impossible to penetrate the meaning and is usually then when reading is abandoned.

3.- Determination of the semantic key of the text. We understand by semantic key that word, noun phrase or sentence that constitutes the essence of what is said in the text, the nucleus around which the whole sentence revolves. Unlike the old use of the term "central idea", the semantic key will always be a lexical-semantic and lexical-syntactic presence explicit in the text: it is there, we have only to find it.

4.- Establishment of networks of words linked to the key. In every text, around the semantic key are extended words or expressions that weave the warp of meaning. It is necessary to know how to locate and group them, establish their relationships and positions, appreciate how they relate to each other or face in contrast; for this reason it is advisable to teach to create diagrams or graphs in which the character of "network" that links them is appreciated.

5.- Elaboration of schemes.

6. Location of areas of personal interest. They are the most subjective part of reading every text. It is the little light that goes on inside only for us and attracts us. The intelligent cultivation of the focus of interest by teachers is an effective way to promote literary appreciation, the exercise of one's own criteria. From there one can start towards the investigation of diverse aspects, towards new readings and fruitful exchanges.

7.- Analysis of syntactic structures that affect the meaning in a special way. In this case we only recommend its exercise by the specialists of the subject, it is not a question of subjecting all the text to a syntactic analysis, but of teaching to perceive how the priority in the placement of a verbal complement, the repetition of a word and the punctuation marks used, augmentative and diminutive, and their links have meaning. The penetration in these aspects will be gradual, according to the level and year in question.

8.- Verbalization of the text by the students in oral and / or written form. Educational psychologists say that what is not able to verbalize is not known. Therefore, to check the overall understanding of the text that has been working and the ability to penetrate its particularities, it is essential that students "translate" it with their own words, explaining according to their possibilities the hierarchy of ideas expressed in the text. This exercise, as appropriate, will be done in oral or written, collective or individual, according to the objectives of the activity, and to the exercise phase with the understanding algorithm in which the students are. The upper phase of verbalization is usually the written value commentary.

Oxford (2016) also offers a basic sequence for the treatment of the understanding that, without being an inflexible scheme, is very guiding. This sequence is as follows:

1. Perception of the text (hearing or reading)

2. Recognition of keywords.

3. Determination of semantic nuclei or main ideas.

4. Application of comprehension strategies.

5. Understanding of the text taking into account the three levels: translation, interpretation and extrapolation.

6. Summary of the meaning of the text using different techniques: construction of paragraphs, synoptic tables, diagrams, etc.

When performing the analysis of the proposed algorithms, previously, it is revealed that it is not totally explicit how to perform the treatment to the vocabulary. The different contributions require only the work with key words or lexical unknowns. However, the understanding of the essential idea of ​​a text is frequent even if all its words are not understood. It is recognized that acquiring strategies to infer meanings from the context keys is not easy and requires time and effort. It is suggested that the following clues should be taken into account:

• When you find an unfamiliar word, read it until the end of the sentence. This makes it possible to decide whether the word has meaning or not for reading comprehension.

• If the word is important, it is necessary to reread the phrase, trying to infer the meaning from the context.

• If the context does not allow a clear understanding, it is necessary to resort to an analysis of the word: prefixes, suffixes, root, among others (strategy to be used with more advanced students).

• If the word is still not understood, the dictionary is used. The use of the dictionary must be continuous; one must teach how to use it (procedure, ordering, abbreviations, structure, annexes). The dictionary is used during the reading process and in each of the subjects under study, not only in the area of ​​Language. It is not advisable to give lists of words to the students to be searched in the dictionary; it is a boring and demotivating activity. Also, words out of context are meaningless.

• Once one has understood the meaning, he has to go back to the text to see if it makes sense. Sometimes the meaning that is selected in the dictionary is not appropriate for the context where a term is found and you have to look for the appropriate one again.

Consequently, it is not enough to have read, searched the dictionary or heard a word to know it; it is necessary to incorporate it into vocabulary. It is important to insist that the students use the new words in sentences or texts, in summaries or arguments. Knowing how to use the built-in vocabulary means consolidating knowledge.

It is thus connoted that the different researches have not recognized the algorithm for the comprehension of texts as a valuable perspective that can make possible the development of students' vocabulary, through a systematic and planned treatment. It is considered that the overall comprehension of a text is made possible better when one enters the vocabulary that is used in the same one.

4.4 Linguistic and didactic considerations on the treatment of vocabulary

The teaching of the mother tongue as an instrument of communication emerges as an effective means, which, mediated by the necessary correction, makes it possible to expand the students' vocabulary. It is necessary, then, that the teacher is his linguistic model par excellence to teach them how to make a correct use of the language in any communicative context in which they are.

It is for this reason that the student should be placed in different and much more complex communicative situations of which he is usually accustomed in the school, family and community. In this way, it prepares to interact in the different learning contexts, with a suitable language based on a reflexive analysis of the interrelation between thought and language in the communication process.

In this interrelationship the word acquires a high significance, through which man plans his future activity, hence they acquire a conscious character. Thought is not only expressed by the word but exists through it.

Important criteria have been developed around this concept. The word is considered as a unit of analysis that connects the individual with society because it is a means of communication that achieves social interrelation; On the other hand, allows the connection of less complex mental functions (perception, reflexes, sensations) to the more complex (consciousness).

For Franco Noa (2008), "the set of words of a language, taking into consideration its semantic value, constitutes the vocabulary or lexicon." For this researcher there is no distinction between lexicon and vocabulary. However, Mokhtar et al. (2007:12) reaffirm that the lexicon is "the set of all lexical units: lexemes and lexis in general; and it opposes that of vocabulary, which he considers as the set of lexemes or nuclear lexis.

The lexicon is thus analyzed as an inter-subjectively available flow, as a systemic inventory available to the speakers of a given national language, and as a more flexible and dynamic part of the language where the socioeconomic and cultural changes that occur more directly and immediately are reflected In the speaking community, as well as the changing needs for linguistic exchange of information, encyclopaedic knowledge, opinions and criteria.

This author also considers that the lexicon is the crossroads, the point where very different aspects interpenetrate and different methodologies and disciplines intersect, whose objectives may diverge, but which coincide in not being able to ignore the lexical unit with their communicative, combinatory, syntagmatic potential and their multiple, systemic and paradigmatic integration. It also states that although progress has been made in the study of the lexicon, the knowledge to detail all the aspects involved in describing this important part is not yet satisfactory.

It is significant to consider that the lexicon is a more structured and nuclear component than the phraseology, if it is considered that this is, in general, more peripheral, fragmented and occasional. This makes geographically abundant phraseology that has only a local or even individual. However, the lexicon is usually a more collective, general and cohesive phenomenon. The same has come to occupy a central place in many current linguistic currents, however, it is not an easy task to design a specific lexicon due to the large number of existing lexical units that make up a whole vocabulary and the constant incursion of new words or new meanings of Words that already exist, taking into account that the lexicon of words of a language forms the lexicon of that language and that also the lexicon can be rich and varied depending on the context.

In trying to solve the dichotomy between the terms lexical and vocabulary, the author of this research specifies that they are two terms closely related to each other; the lexicon refers to the system of words that make up a language and the units that make up the lexicon are called lexemes. In this way, when these virtual units of the language are updated in the discourse of an author, a speaker, a literary school, a science, they receive the name of words or words and the whole of them form the vocabulary. That the vocabulary of a language reflects the physical and social environment of its speakers because it is an inventory of the ideas, interests and occupations of the community, so that languages ​​are adapted to the concerns, interests and experiences of the speakers.

The vocabulary of a person can be defined as the set of words that are understood by that person or as the set of words probably used by this person. Vocabulary acquisition is a very complex process. The first distinction to be made is between passive vocabulary and active vocabulary. The first is the vocabulary that the subject understands without help or with very little help, but is not able to use autonomously. The second, is the vocabulary that the subject understands without problems, but also, is able to use when needed and without the need for help. (Singleton, 2016)

It seems clear, therefore, that a person's broader vocabulary is passive vocabulary, and it also seems clear that if a person does not have a word "stored" in his passive vocabulary, that word may hardly become part of their active vocabulary.

The above can be distinguished as vocabulary of recognition or vocabulary of meaning. The first consists of the set of words that a person is able to pronounce or read. The vocabulary of meaning is the set of words that a person understands and is able to use; generally, is linked to the individual experiences that man has during his life.

How can you acquire such a broad vocabulary? The answers are several, but all depend on a systematic and continuous work by the teacher: reading a lot and all kinds of texts, extracting the meaning from the context, using the vocabulary learned, using the dictionary are just some of the mechanisms.

It is not possible to speak of a pupil with mastery of oral and written language, if communicative competence is not achieved in advance, which leads to the enrichment of vocabulary, an aspect that deserves special attention; and it was warned by the linguist Esteva (1982) when he rightly points out that "he worries about the poverty of vocabulary and the deficiencies in his teaching."

On the other hand, it has often been estimated that the treatment of vocabulary is exclusive to English or other disciplines of the Humanities. It is necessary to extend its study to the different contexts of learning, because otherwise would result in a reduced spectrum of concepts, meanings and meanings that the student could use in their communication.

As a fundamental principle for working with vocabulary, it is necessary that teachers systematically study active vocabulary. The work in this sense should be directed to the enrichment of the active vocabulary through the incorporation of words belonging to the passive, as well as of others not known by the students.

From the previous analysis, it is necessary that the work with the vocabulary, its enrichment, must be a systematic task and a permanent concern of the teachers, in order to improve the oral and written language of the students. It is recommended the use of procedures for the creation of new lexical units, the formation of family of words, work with synonymy, antonyms, homonymy and paronymy.

It is important to mention that the enrichment of vocabulary is not only in the number of words known, but also in the domain and use of different meanings of words. From this reflection it is imposed that the teaching staff to channel the teaching of vocabulary must keep in mind that words are not isolated either in the communicative act or in the language itself, but "a given term is like the centre of a constellation, the point where other coordinate terms converge whose sum is indefinite"

In relation to these associations Bally, Charles (1950) coined the term associative field and advanced more in the development of these ideas: "The associative field is a halo that surrounds the sign and whose outer fringes are confused with its environment." The word student makes think of: study, efforts, strength, will, interest. Finally he can evoke idea of ​​sacrifice, persistence, exchange.

In the linguistic literature on the theory of the fields, according to Bedoya (2004), there is a great variety of conceptual terminology; the following terms have been used to refer to the field: semantic field, lexical field, lexical field – semantic, linguistic field, field of words, conceptual field, thematic group, associative group and others.

"The associative fields, a term assumed to designate this network of associations that surrounds the word, have an extraordinary importance in the development of thought and its use in education is eminently didactic since they constitute the most rational procedure and the same A more attractive time to achieve that this work does not become a cold inventory of words, but in a procedure structured by the student from his own vision of the world and the society in which he lives "( Bedoya, 2004). This axiom of the relations of words is of great importance for the teaching of vocabulary teaching because it gives rise to the groupings of the words attending different points of view and then the activities can be varied and practically innumerable.

Thus, each word is defined or "signified" by its opposition to another or others within the verbal context and this meaning is given, in a linear or syntagmatic sense, by the morphemes that constitute it, whether lexical or grammatical, and by the Syntactic relationships between words or lexemes; And, in a deeper sense, by the paradigmatic associative relations that determine the differentiation or individualization of the term versus the series of signs related to it in the system.

This means that an isolated word can only have an imprecise character and can not be considered – from the communicative point of view – independently of its syntactic relations in the context or in the line of discourse; And that its realization or updating in the speech chain also depends on other types of relationships that are established outside the discourse, in associative depth within the speaker's brain.

Finally, it is suggested that for the expansion of the vocabulary from the perspective of the understanding of texts, the teacher consider the structuring of the associative fields and help of the following types of relationships:

I. By its relation with the referent (aspect of the reality to which it is referred), example:

A- Name of the objects used by the student: table, pencil, rubber, notebook, book, notebook.

B- Qualities related to the student: brave, disciplined, brave, devoted, willing, solidary.

C- Actions related to the student: to train, to practice, to study, to share.

II. By the procedures that take part in the formation of words:

A- By derivation (procedure by which new words are created by adding affixes: prefixes and suffixes to the lexical morpheme or lexeme). Derivation by prefixes: underdevelopment, indisposed, subtopic. Derivation by suffixation: humanism, communism, internationalism.

B- By composition (procedure with which new words are created, by the union of two or more lexical morphemes or lexemes: parachutes, lightning rods, umbrellas.

III. Through the structuring of families of words (association of lexical character that establish the words that have the same lexical morpheme or lexeme: homeland, patriotism, repatriated.

IV. For its orthographic similarity: bone, trace, strike.

V. For the establishment of lexical relations.

A-By synonymy- relationship established between words of similar meaning: challenge-duel, supremacy-hegemony, encourage-exhort)

B-By antonym- relationship established between words of opposing meanings: aggressive-passive, defeat-victory)

C-By homonymy- relation between words of the same phonic form, but they have different meanings and writing or relation between words of the same phonic form and writing, but they have different meanings: palm- tree or lower part and something concave of the hand, from the wrist to the fingers.

D- By paronymy- relationship between words of pronunciation and similar writing, but which have different meanings

E- By Hyponymy -relationship that is based on the inclusion of a term of more specific meaning in another of more general meaning: argue, analyze, define (skills).

It is then exemplified by an activity that can be used in classes to encourage the development of vocabulary from the perspective of text comprehension.

An interesting activity is the elaboration of semantic constellations (Christen, Alfano and Robinson, 2014). This activity also favours the ability to rank and classify the different concepts. It is assumed that this author proposes, although part of the work with the understanding component. They can be made by teams, in pairs or collectively. It can be an activity of the class or it can be oriented as independent work. In this activity students should be encouraged to form the largest constellations.

In the formation of the constellations will appear words that can be presented by a student and that are not known by other students. This is a moment of socialization, therefore will indicate the search for meanings in the dictionary, precision of synonyms, antonyms; And will develop textual construction exercises that will allow their incorporation into the active vocabulary.

The constellations are formed or established taking into account several types of semantic relation, which are the following:

1) Synonymy, example: insecure, doubtful, hesitant, uncertain.

2) Antonym, example: pride, humility

3) Composition

4) Derivation, example: rule, rule, regulation

5) Association, example: conference, lecturer, auditorium

6) Extension, example: orchestra, violin, bugle

A good example of exercise in this respect may be the following one:

Please read carefully the following text:

The family is the basic social group created by ties of kinship or marriage present in all societies. Ideally, the family provides its members with protection, company, security and socialization. The structure and role of the family varies according to society. The nuclear family (two adults with their children) is the main unit of the most advanced societies. In others this nucleus is subordinate to a large family with grandparents and other relatives. A third family unit is the single parent family, where the children live only with the father or the mother in a situation of singleness, widowhood or divorce.

1- How important do you give the family?

2- The text appears a group of words that will allow you to continue expanding your vocabulary. Complete with what you are asked.

to. Primitive word of singleness __________

B. Group word family

C) Two words derived from a child: ____________ and _____________

3- Write a title to the text.

4- Remove the keywords. Choose one and form a constellation.

5- Explain the type of relationship that is established between the words of the constellation.

As a conclusion, it can be ensured that the analysis of the literature consulted reveals fissures in the didactic conception for the treatment of text comprehension, since the proposed algorithms do not explicitly reveal the coherent work to achieve the development of the vocabulary of the students.

4.5 Lexical learning from a cognitive-discursive perspective

The studies concerning the teaching of lexicon teaching have experienced a great boom in recent years, as the relevance of their treatment in the classroom has become evident (Bühmann et al, 2014).

No one doubts the importance of the lexicon to achieve a good acquisition of any language or for the reading and writing of a text, linguistically, psychologically and pragmatically. To learn a language is necessarily (not exclusively) to learn its vocabulary, because in the lexicon all the knowledge of phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and it is through the considerable potentialities of words, that man can do Reference to the extra-linguistic and linguistic world itself. However, the teaching of the lexicon from a cognitive-discursive perspective, is still far from having a great diffusion among the researchers, especially in the mother tongue studies. Although much has been said about its role in the teaching-learning process as a way of accessing knowledge, in practice its decisive importance for textual understanding and production has not always been taken into account; That is to say, as a tool for students to understand words in different contexts and so that they can be used in the elaboration of coherent, effective and adequate texts to different situations of communication. It is therefore necessary to provide students with strategies to increase the lexicon permanently, in order to increase not only their quantitative mastery, but also to penetrate different areas of knowledge.

One may pretend to reflect on the role of the lexicon in teaching-learning of the mother tongue and on the other, to offer some cognitive-discursive strategies for the development of these lexical contents, by integrating different types of activities In order to achieve an integral communicative competence.

In this respect, a descriptive study was carried out based on the bibliographical review about the most used methods for obtaining data on lexical learning strategies. It was also used, the analysis-synthesis, which allowed to discern between the different concepts of learning strategies and to assume the most appropriate to the elaborated proposal. Surveys and interviews were applied to students and teachers to characterize the treatment given to the lexicon in the teaching-learning process. Materials such as: worksheets and cards were designed to facilitate the implementation of the activities carried out in order to promote lexical learning of students.

The planning of the teaching-learning process for professional communication should focus on establishing the right conditions for students to acquire and develop the communicative skills that need to be applied in a given context. Such skills require knowledge of the language, knowledge of the context of use and knowledge of the characteristics of the communication process; or what is equal, the mastery of the different dimensions that integrate communicative competence. However, daily educational practice demonstrates that this goal is not always achieved and one of the main obstacles to this – no matter what grade level it is – is the lexical poverty of the students, or what is the same, the lack of an adequate command of vocabulary to express in writing or orally the expressions or ideas manifested by themselves in the different situations of communication in which they interact. This is reflected in poverty and imprecise vocabulary, inadequate handling of various functional styles, inaccurate answers and lack of knowledge of the essential norms that regulate the correct use of the language. This is compounded by the difficulty of understanding words in different contexts and using them in the production of coherent, effective and appropriate texts for different communication situations. On the other hand, the process of reviewing official and personal documents, the interviews with teachers in the area and the linguistic tests applied to the students revealed that there are still insufficiencies in the teaching of the lexicon as a necessary element to favour the development of communicative competence at secondary level. Among the elements that affect are:

The direction of the teaching-learning process of lexical units does not always enhance the development of skills related to the communicative function of language.

The methods, techniques, and procedures employed by teachers are not fully developer or conducive to working with vocabulary outside and within the classroom.

Working with vocabulary is limited to the mechanical analysis of a set of words of unknown meaning and the search for that meaning in the dictionary.

Students do not make proper use of the vocabulary of the subjects by not using scientific terms that guarantee the effectiveness in understanding what is read.

The relationships or associations established by the words in the sentence and even in the text itself are not taken into account. This leads to the de-contextualization of the lexicon and the lack of reflection on the communicative uses of language.

The bibliographical analysis made it possible to demonstrate that, from a discursive cognitive perspective, the acquisition and use of the lexicon is part of higher level strategic cognitive processes, such as inferential ones, which include other more basic mechanisms such as memory, etc. Consequently, vocabulary is not learned by the student in isolation or in the form of a list, but basically in relation to the comprehension and production of a text produced in a given communicative context. Its acquisition for other uses depends on the management of strategies by a subject who must assume an eminently active role in this process. Therefore, if one of the purposes of teaching is the understanding of texts, strategies linked to vocabulary must, among other things, avoid the difficulty of continuing reading or listening to a text by stopping at every unknown word. The student must give an approximate sense to the word with the help of the context; in this respect, to use linguistic and extra-linguistic indexes to facilitate the inference of the meaning of the word, whenever it considers that it is important for the comprehension of the text. If, on the contrary, the objective is the production of texts, it is necessary to take into account to learn vocabulary, on the one hand, to write texts using various mechanisms of articulation without the repetition of the same words and on the other, to use words that have a relation between yes; That is, they belong to the same lexical field in order to contribute to the coherence of the text. The teacher must know what lexical content will be studied in the classroom and from there make the planning of their learning taking into account the following aspects:

Lexical objectives: the language class should aim to improve the student's understanding and expression. He needs to understand the words of the texts he receives and to use them accurately and appropriately in the texts he produces. That is why vocabulary activities do not have complete meaning in themselves, but are subordinated to more global and communicative goals.

Lexical selection: determining which lexicon the learner should acquire is essential. It is necessary to select the keywords required for the completion and improvement of relevant communicative tasks that meet the needs of the students.

Learning strategies: several strategies are used to promote the acquisition and consolidation of the lexicon. The goal is for students to become aware of and control their learning through the use of certain strategies that allow them to renew and enrich their personal vocabulary

At this point it is necessary to leave what is understood by learning strategy. The studies on learning strategies have reached a great boom in recent years in the pedagogical context. Its importance is given by the fact that they encompass those resources that the student uses when confronted with learning and that has a lot to do with the disposition, motivation, the planning of activities and the cognitive resources that sets in motion to reach the outlined objectives. The teaching of strategic processes is what allows the student to organize in a significant way their previous and new knowledge to apply them in a communication situation, in such a way as to promote a more effective and autonomous learning and to take control of its expression. Strategies are, therefore, a global scheme of action formed in long-term memory that, once automated, allows to act effectively in a new situation. They need to be learned and exercised before being automated. In spite of the controversy, complex and wide that is the subject on learning strategies and the disparity of criteria around them, it is assumed in this work the concept offered by the group of authors directed by Bresnan et al (2015), who define the Learning strategies as "the set of processes, actions and activities that learners can intentionally deploy to support and improve their learning …". Specific vocabulary learning strategies, therefore, are nothing more than particular applications of general learning strategies.

On the basis of these approaches, the elaborated proposal is based, not on the learning of isolated words, but on the incorporation of multiple strategies of the type proposed by Bresnan et al., which give an account of how they interrelate (Pragmatic and discursive), conceptual (semantic) and grammatical (morphological and syntactic) aspects in the lexical functioning and its projection in the text or discourse in general. Here are some of the learning strategies that allowed the student to take the lexicon as a tool for understanding and producing texts. They are: pragmatic-discursive, lexical-semantic, morpho-syntactic, lexical-cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies.

The pragmatic-discursive and meta-cognitive strategies

The first are oriented to achieve a lexical selection appropriate to the communicative situation based on factors such as discursive gender, textual type, subject, record, purposes of the speakers. The latter, allow the regulation of cognition, allow monitoring of learning and grant autonomy for study. The type of activity proposed here allows the student to acquire strategies to deal with unknown and important words, whose meaning can be induced from the context or using strategies to infer data about the grammatical form of the word (category), about its Semantic aspect, on their sociolinguistic value (registration) … This reduces the number of words that must be consulted in a dictionary. Likewise, the student can analyze different definitions to deduce their syntactic structure and the different types of information they provide, while defining underlined words in a text without consulting the dictionary and taking into account only the context in which they appear.

Lexical-semantic strategies allow the lexicon to be transmitted in a clear and precise way to avoid problems of incoherence, ambiguity, imprecision, redundancy, etc. These types of strategies are based on the recognition and use of lexical-semantic relations (hyponymy, synonymy, antonyms, metonymy, associations by world knowledge, expressive effects: metaphors, euphemisms, hyperbole, or polysemy and homonymy). In this case, tasks such as: recognition of antonymic semantic fields in different opinion texts; substitution in certain texts of words underlined by synonyms or equivalent expressions; paraphrase sentences in relation to some segment relevant to the interpretation of the text; recognize in an academic text inclusion relations (hyponyms and hyperonyms); search for words that imply terminological accuracy from the discursive context; reflect on the need not to use ambiguous or inaccurate terms.

The lexical-cognitive strategies establish the relation between lexicon and knowledge of the world, which allows to recognize the influence of conceptual framework in vocabulary incorporation and to establish associative networks that integrate the new terminological units with the previous knowledge of the students. Here students may be asked, for example, to write words that can be associated with certain mental schemes: travelling by plane, by boat, going out for a walk, going to the theatre, and from them writing a text.

Morph-syntactic strategies contribute not only to extracting information from the internal structure of words, but also to optimizing the use of different types of words, as well as observing the regularities of derivation, flexion and composition mechanisms, from Of the semantic interpretation of the elements of formation. They are also important for discovering the meanings of new words and correctly connecting the words in the utterance. In this aspect, the students worked with texts of different typology.

In practice, this finding allows to corroborate the importance of the development of the lexicon in order to favour in the subjects not only an enrichment of their vocabulary but also the necessary competence for the communicative act in different spheres of action. It also led one to delve into the significant potential of words and explore the many ways in which we can extend their uses. Vocabulary is undoubtedly one of the elements that best blocks the knowledge of the world and one of the basic components for the development of communicative competence. Their increase, therefore, is a priority, both in language learning and in the improvement of their own abilities in the mother tongue.

Although the treatment of the lexicon should serve to achieve other objectives (linguistic skills, interpretation of texts, etc.), it is necessary to favour the development of the lexical domain in a systematic, organized, planned and contextualized in the classroom. In addition to lexical planning (selection and grading), it is necessary to design exclusive activities that facilitate both the comprehension, retention and use of lexical units and the development of strategies (learning and communication) that allow students to increase their vocabulary and This, his communicative competence. The mastery of vocabulary of a language enables a learning developer when the student communicates making effective use of it, based on their potential and communication needs and establishing links between these needs, knowledge and idiomatic skills to apply them creatively in their social interaction. The lexical domain or quality of the vocabulary depends on the relationships – of whatever type – that the learner is able to establish between a new lexical unit and other already known lexical units and their capacity to identify the significant varieties of each one of them and to use them In the appropriate records. The proposed strategies allow the development of the lexicon from a cognitive-discursive perspective, while reflecting the students on their own cognitive and discursive processes, and systematizing the knowledge in a practice that does not abandon the lexicon as a vehicle of textual understanding and production.

4.6 English vocabulary teaching-learning with the Collage method

The autonomous teaching-learning of the vocabulary with the Collage method can fit it within the line of investigation of new didactic paths in the teaching of foreign languages ​​since it is included within a method of teaching innovation.

The Collage Method is a new way of understanding the teaching of Foreign Languages ​​(FL), focused on an autonomous, inverse2 and eclectic teaching in which authentic materials are handled with different types of text and uses various working procedures and reading comprehension strategies . It deals, among other things, with the capacity to search for reference works, since it is assumed that it is fundamental for the student to develop this capacity and we, as teachers, should help him to use dictionaries, bilingual and monolingual, give importance to the use of encyclopaedias, different grammars with different approaches, the Internet and its possibilities, parallel texts, etc. (Mazur, 2013)

Considering that Collage is a method that answers all the latest research on the methodology of foreign languages, we want to go deeper here on the study of how to teach vocabulary with Collage. Thus, the specific objective of this work can be said to be to create effective conditions for learning vocabulary. We finish this work with what it means all this for teaching in the classroom, or the didactic orientations that we must follow as teachers and some general conclusions about it.

Teaching vocabulary with Collage

In vocabulary teaching with Collage, we integrate contents of several levels of the European Reference Framework of Languages ​​published by the Council of Europe (2001), that is, we do not make a clear distinction of levels, as proposed by the framework, but These are mixed because for us the important thing is not to divide contents according to their difficulty but to integrate them to achieve a global understanding of the language, as indicated by the text that we have in front and to achieve a faster advance of the lexical and linguistic competence in general of the LE . For this reason, we defend not to delimit a priori the contents of a basic level or higher, the text itself will mark these limits and complexity is given progressively according to the type of text, the sender, the receiver, etc. Thus, the material is organized and previously selected so that this progression has a unitary and complete sense, following textual criteria and pragmatic rather than grammatical.

A method proposed on a systematic, semantic and pragmatic combination can not capture all the combinations that the grammatical and lexical system admits in any natural language. The objective of Collage is to accommodate a good number of these systematic combinations, but above all to group them into paradigms in which generalizations of semantic or pragmatic nature are presented, which are sufficiently exemplified and are considered representative of the information that determined combinatorial restriction .

Following the guidelines of the lexical approach, introduced by Lewis (1993, 1997 and 2000), we believe that we must "lexicalize" grammar. The lexicalization of grammar is that the learner must learn the lexicon of a language accompanied by its grammatical structures, lexical combinations, and fixed or semi-finite expressions. Not only must a series of words be learned to increase their vocabulary, but multiword, placements, "words" 4 must be learned in their co-text as well as in context.

The lexical gradation in Collage is given by the text itself that works in class or at home and by the student's previous knowledge not only of the world, but in concrete on textual conventions, as well as by the knowledge of other LE and The mother tongue itself (LM). What helps us in the understanding and subsequent production of a text is everything previously known about linguistic and extralingual elements, textual and pragmatic. So we have to draw attention and to arouse the curiosity of our students about how the English lexicon works, one may emphasize elements of morphemically and semantic competence. (Thompson and Alba-Juez, 2014:58-87)

With the Collage method the lexical competence – and in general the whole English language – is taught following a functional vision of the language and trying to avoid equivalences 1 = 1. The student must develop certain learning strategies and techniques to incorporate new words into his lexicon in LE, which are organized in his personal lexicon entries.

As for the general procedures that we carry out in the Collage method, we follow the latest theories about language teaching to promote student autonomy and take into account the strategies of reading comprehension that we have been hearing since the 1990s in authors Such as Van Dijk and Kintsch (1993) and Pearson and Campbell (1994), among others; but, above all, the most recent ones as the keys to infer and understand Leon (2003). That is why we emphasize the new role that both student and teacher must take to develop these theories efficiently.

One may consider that the morphology is also interesting because the creation of new words -existing- is a practice of man, which one can not deny. On a daily basis we can create new words, and in fact we create them, by influence of English, by social needs of "going with the times", etc. However, the possibility of creation is determined by the knowledge of the context, understood „as a system of beliefs and knowledge about the world and about the English language which is being learned, so we must compare the processes of acquisition of FL to determine this small "great" universe of words.

The morph lexical competence in Collage

As Ashraf (2015) said, the student has to pay special attention – for example – to the formation of words in English (composition, derivation, parasynthesis, shortening, loans) and rules of word formation, but only as a resource of learning the lexical functioning of English to find the meaning or meaning of the word in question and, above all, for the comprehension of the text. Let us not forget that we work with authentic texts, without adaptations of any kind and morpholxical phenomena appear more or less frequently arbitrarily, that is, it is the learning process itself that leads to see these phenomena at a given time. For this, the student makes comparisons, assimilations, etc. In short, he experimented with the new language in a contrastive and creative way.

The teacher, finally, should help to reflect on the different kinds of words that exist in our language and the possible combinations; what he does is to try to draw attention to these phenomena so that the student captures and internalizes them for their better and greater understanding and learning of the English language. In addition, the student can have a series of linguistic aids to recognize the different types of composition in English. For example, the teacher can give the learner a series of suffixes and prefixes appearing in a given text and make a table for the learner to complete with the prefixes and suffixes he needs at any given time. This type of exercise is important, although it is more morphological than lexical, to recognize morpheme meanings (person suffixes, verbs, adjectives, etc.), but it also helps the learner in creating other words and as a basis for the understanding of future similar texts or not.

4.7 Personal notes

The methodological procedure that we follow with the texts in Collage is based on the technique of O-H-E (Observation-Hypothesis-Experiment) (Lewis, 2002: 149). In observation, the new language must be presented and perceived. At this point we are closer to the Natural Approach of Krashen, because we believe that although the new must also take place to advance in the acquisition-learning of the new language, it must start from the known, that is, from an i + 1.

The hypothesis means classifying the input according to seemingly similar and different meanings. This can be done without necessarily being able to describe explicit categories or procedures, that is, it should not be too important for students to make totally certain hypotheses of the text before them. In these first hypotheses, the errors should not be taken into account, and, moreover, may favour later conclusion about what the text in question is about. Experimentation includes using the language according to students interlanguage, according to their best hypotheses. Encourage new input, provide examples that confirm and contradict some of the students' hypotheses.

To incorporate new words into his lexicon in FL, the student organizes these in his personal notes, where he outlines the aspects captured and that he could use in future texts. This phase of analysis constitutes the basis for progress in the learning of vocabulary, and of the language in general. The following scheme is usually established:

On textual typology, we include the type of text and its most relevant characteristics so that the students recognize in future texts common characteristics and facilitate the way of working with the same. As for the linguistic aspects, we refer here not only to the grammatical structures but also to the communicative intentions and linguistic means necessary to realize these communicative intentions.

To do this, we ask questions about a particular structure, even being able to compare with their language or the common language, English, in our case. Likewise, they can write what they want, it does not have to be used linguistic terminology. That is, the students themselves write their own grammar rules. With regard to the last two aspects (lexical fields and working procedures) we explain them more closely in the following pages, since they are the ones that interest us most in the teaching of vocabulary.

The lexical fields

As for the lexical fields we have to say that all the didactic material of Collage is organized by different thematic blocks. We prefer, like Molina (2004), to organize lexical fields considering different kinds of words. We believe that thinking about the language used to talk about the subject in question does not mean simply naming the objects associated with the subject, that is, the most important thing – as we have already said – is not only the context or situational factors, but also the co-text , That is to say, those linguistic means that accompany the word or the subject in question. In addition, in order to complete the learning of a field, we think, following Catalán (2014), that we must take into account the possible placements that may accompany that word. These lexical placements must be completed little by little, according to the individual criteria of the apprentices and also with the help of the text itself and the teacher, with which we are favouring the student's autonomy. Thus, we prefer to denominate lexical fields to semantic fields to refer to those words or multiword related not only to the semantic field to which they belong (health, food, work …) but also to words, verbs, adjectives, etc. that we associate with each term (being sick, having sex, contracting diseases, etc.) and that would, in our opinion, conform a lexical field.

The approach that we make in class is as follows: the teacher points on the blackboard as many lexical fields as the students have deduced from the text, previously encapsulated in a semantic field that the students themselves can call their own free will. It is advisable to remind them not to write loose words, but complete lexical fields (noun + adj. + V. + Other complements) and always with examples taken from the texts, trying to avoid equivalence 1 = 1, and long lists of words of the method Traditional and that, unfortunately, still today our students are still bent on collecting in their vocabulary notebooks. It is demonstrated that the student learns better the contextualized and co-textualized words that alone and we must make aware of it to our students.

Thus, we have, for example, a series of adjectives related to the semantic field of 'tourism'. Now, to complete the learning of that field, we must take into account the possible placements that may accompany that word. What adjectives, what verbs and what other complements can be associated with this field? Hence we prefer to call 'lexical fields' instead of 'semantic fields'. These lexical placements should be completed little by little, according to individual apprentices' criteria and also with the help of the text itself and the teacher.

Working procedures

As for the working procedures or mechanisms to be used for the comprehension of a text – and, in general, for the acquisition-learning of vocabulary within a communicative, non-functional and pragmatic-textual teaching such as ours- We believe that the learner should write down the contextualized lexicon, as Cervero and Phicardo (2000) also say to write down complete examples of the different lexical units, expressions, etc. That manages in every moment. In addition, students should try several times learned words, not only in the same class, but also in later classes with other texts, as students should review the contents half-known so that they become part of a day of their lexicon. They also undertake to associate lexicon with textual conventions, such as the situation, type of text, subject, sender and receiver, etc. To address successful communication at all times.

Regarding the integration of content, we must point out something important, this integration must be made on the basis of lexical units, that is, without "words", phrases, ideas, etc. There are no grammatical constructions. The lexical competence – and in general the whole English language – we teach it following a functional vision and try to avoid equivalences 1 = 1 (or direct translation). That is, we intend to end the long list of vocabulary decontextualized, following a basic lexical principle, and is that – as Baralo (1997 and 2001) say – one must point and store in the mental lexicon the elements that are often found together. It is evident that if the learner can relate the lexicon of the corresponding associative network, this favours a better retention and recovery of the vocabulary, but when this correspondence does not exist it must handle other autonomous networks that it must create itself as a conscious, autonomous and creative person of his learning.

Learning strategies

Already Nisbet and Schucksmith (1987) said that students, as autonomous and creative in their learning, had to develop a series of learning strategies and we as teachers should help them to find them. In this sense, we recall the development of the search capacity of reference works, which shows Collage. It is fundamental for all FL secondary students to be encouraged and guided to a rational use of different reference works: bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, importance of parallel texts, themes and texts on the Internet, use of encyclopaedias, as well as of different grammars with different approaches, etc.

On the other hand, the activities we provide to our students favour both the strategies of lexical associations (morphological, semantic, lexical, discursive and pragmatic) and morphological associations (derivation and composition); Semantics (hyponymy and hyperonymy, synonymy and antonyms, polysemy, associative semantic fields); Lexical associations (idiomatic expressions); Discursive (textual connectors) and pragmatic (lexical selection conditioned by the variables of the communication situation).

Finally, we list here some strategies that we believe are essential for students to develop in the course of their learning:

1. Use the learned words several times in the same class.

2. Learn the lexicon associated with a series of textual conventions such as the situation, the type of text, the subject, etc.

3. Write down the lexicon as it appears in class.

4. Integrate the lexical contents with the other contents of the programming

4.8 The new role of the student

Some authors began to see the need to change the role of the student. Later, Martin Peris (2000) summarizes very well the characteristics that the new type of student must develop, among which we emphasize the following: he must assume responsibility, since he is the one that organizes his linguistic advance, although the selection of texts is The one that marks these aspects in some way, that is, the selection criteria are determinant for the progression of the student, but it is the student himself – as being independent of his learning – that determines what, when and how to write in his notebook, That is, you must know what goals you want to achieve at all times. We must, therefore, allow students to make decisions and write their own rules, so that they can make later decisions. This way, the student's autonomy is encouraged, that is, the student must be able to self-evaluate his / her acquisition process of the Object Language and learn techniques and learning strategies to improve his / her own learning, progress, etc. In definition, the same students should describe what they see and be creative in FL learning.

4.9 The new role of the teacher

In order to develop this autonomy, Martin Peris (1993), among others, studied the new role of the teacher, who must be shown before the student as a guide, organizer and adviser. The teacher should not give an immediate answer without having given a time of deliberation to the student. As an organizer and consultant, it compiles the transmission of knowledge and strategies and the development of skills, thus facilitating learning, depending on the target group and its level. It is aware of the individual needs and different learning styles, contributes to the creation of a relaxed environment, shares with the learner responsibility for lexical decision making, thus favouring the student's involvement in the learning process, proposes activities that Allow students to apply strategies and discuss with them which ones can be useful, how and when. The important thing is the exchange of experiences and not the right solution, no more. To do this, it shows lexical examples with different strategic procedures.

4.10 Didactic implications

What all this means for teaching is that the tendency to be given in the classroom, or the teaching guidelines that we must follow as teachers, as proposed by Salazar (1994), is a curriculum appropriate to different learning styles. However, the educational environment should be favourable for reflection, that is, it should be an open framework in an affective climate conducive to the student's reflection on his / her own style of learning, on the skills and strategies that he / she tends to be used preferably. A student who is aware of his / her learning style and attentive to a continuous improvement of it is better able to exploit it adequately beyond the conventional educational field and beyond the circumstances more or less favourable to those that he is forced to face throughout the process. According to the aspirations of autonomous and directed learning, the purpose of the curriculum is not only to learn, but also to "learn to learn". We can say at this point that for the satisfactory development of a student-centred curriculum, we also need an orientation towards aspects that are so popular today as are multiculturalism and inter-culturality, plurality and diversity.

The general conclusions of this work can be summarized in two basic points:

• The need for a new approach in FL methodology.

• The practical and real teaching of lexical learning strategies.

Due to the professional and personal needs of our students today when it comes to learning a language and, more specifically, the lexicon of a language, we need a different approach in FL teaching methodology. As we know, English is currently being studied not only for "going to the supermarket" or "going out of business" for personal needs, but it is also true that more and more young people, especially secondary school students, try to approach English with a professional objective, to mark a future with greater number of labour expectations. We do not forget that the methodological panorama has already changed over the last ten or fifteen years, and different methodologies such as English for specific purposes have become quite important in the classroom. However, we have gone a little further, since we believe that English for specific purposes – and the other methods currently available in the market – do not fully respond to the needs of our students to integrate from the beginning of the Teaching-learning all that the latest theoretical trends have been providing us from the focus by tasks, lexical approach or content integration.

Finally, we – for all – want to give the guidelines so that the student in the future has the keys or the ability to deal only with complex texts and different textual conventions, types of text, situations and themes, taking into account the issuer And receiver, the purpose of the text, etc. Therefore, we decided to carry out the approaches of Collage for the teaching of vocabulary. We believe that with this approach, students not only learn, but acquire vocabulary more autonomously than other methods because they actively integrate the learning strategies and working procedures that must follow for it.

CHAPTER V. THE EXPERIMENTAL STAGE REGARDING THE IMPACT OF MODERN EDUCATIONAL MEANS AND INTERACTIVE METHODS IN DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ MENTAL LEXICON

5.1. Pre-experimental stage. Basic tools and methods

5.1.1. The premise and the aims of the research

The main objective of the present research is to highlight the advantages and limitations of the methods in the formation and development of competences by English teaching – learning to the students at secondary cycle. Subordinate to the proposed goal, the pedagogical experiment will take into account the following aspects:

1. the efficiency that the use of modern educational means and implicit interactive methods have in teaching – learning English language at the level of secondary cycle, respectively the mental lexicon;

2. the appreciation of the correlation between the systematic use of modern educational means and the improvement of the school performances of secondary students.

The general hypothesis can be formulated as follows:

• Using interactive methods systematically in the context of teaching-learning-assessment at the English Language discipline, respectively the mental lexicon, one may observe a significant contribution to the improvement of the students' performance in the secondary cycle.

The approach of didactic activities in the experiment was carried out from the perspective of checking the specific assumptions in a derivation report with the general hypothesis.

Specific hypotheses:

1. The systematic use of interactive methods in the context of didactic activity, respectively the mental lexicon, influences significantly the formation and development of competences, the ability to understand and use the specific concepts of English Language in ways corresponding to the needs of individual life as regards the students in the secondary cycle.

2. The systematic use, in didactic activity, of modern educational means influences significantly the formation and development of the capacity to understand and use the specific terms and concepts of English Language as well as the ability to experiment and explore / investigate reality through the use of specific tools and procedures.

3. The optimal use of modern educational means, combined with interactive methods has a significant influence on the efficiency of teaching in the secondary cycle in order to develop students’ mental lexicon.

Research objectives

The research objectives can be expressed as following:

• to participate actively and interactively in learning, to discover new knowledge in collaboration with other colleagues and under the guidance of the teacher;

• to discover, recognize and use correspondences and successions or phenomena associated with the given rules;

• to explore different ways of learning;

• to observe and denote the effects of phenomena and use a specific language in the description of various situations;

• to form a correct and efficient intellectual work style that they can adopt in their learning activity.

Research variables

In terms of the general hypothesis, the following variables have been set for this experiment:

– independent variable – this variable is represented by the design and development of learning activities based on modern educational means and, implicitly, on interactive methods, focusing on their systematic use in didactic activities;

– Ist dependent variable: level of school results obtained by secondary school students (grades A and B) at the English Language discipline;

– IInd dependent Variable: students attitude towards school and learning in the secondary cycle.

Major Research Coordinates:

The research took place between the 15th of November, 2016 and the 26th of May, 2017.

Sample of Participants:

– Experimental sample: Grade A, ……… School, name of the city, 19 students: 10 male students and 9 female students.

– Control sample: Grade B, …….Secondary School, name of the city, represented by 20 pupils, 8 boys and 12 girls.

The content sample was represented by:

• Curricular area: Foreign Languages

• Discipline: English Language and Literature

The learning units approached were:

…………………………………

…………………………………

5.1.2. Methods and techniques of investigation

The didactic methods applied in the context of present research have been selected so as to have the capacity to respond to the requirements of a pedagogical investigation, but also to prevent potential errors in investigation and processing of factual material. In this context, in order to confirm or refute the previously established general hypothesis we used a methodological system made up of the following methods:

-the method of the conversation

-the method of systematic observation;

-the method of analyzing the products of the activity;

-the case study method

-the method of the medium-term psycho-pedagogical / didactic experiment. This experiment was carried out in stages, according to the following phases: the pre-experimental phase, the experimental phase and the post-experimental phase.

The observation method is used to investigate and collect the experimental data according to the requirements of the type:

• formulating the exact purpose of observation,

• drawing up the observation plan,

• recording the data in a proper manner (video, audio, or classical),

• classification,

• comparing,

• reporting

• Data interpretation.

Observation can be spontaneous, scientific, exploration-oriented and experimental. This is one of the main methods of direct investigation, manifesting itself in the form of a systematic act of careful follow-up of the educational process, under certain sides, without making any changes from the researcher. The natural observation can be undertaken in parallel with the current activities, the observer's teaching staff giving him the opportunity to consider the quality of the activities carried out by the pupils, the frequent errors in solving the various problems, the typical situations in which one manifests indiscipline or inattention. In the context of this method, the observed data is immediately recorded, without the pupils becoming aware of this. In this respect, we used the observation sheet on the basis of which we prepared the observation protocol. The data gathered, after being ordered and interpreted, gave me a primary orientation on the subject of this research, as well as some methodical suggestions useful for the next stage.

The method of conversation involves the discussion of the teacher's framework, whose role is that of the researcher and student, respectively the subject investigated. This method allows direct observation and direct appreciation of the pupil's inner life, the intentions behind his behaviour, as well as the opinions, beliefs, attitudes, aspirations, interests, conflicts, prejudices and mentalities, feelings and values ​​of the pupil.

The advantage of this method is that it allows the collection of numerous, varied and valuable information in a short time and without the need for special materials and equipment. Organized from an intellectual and affective point of view, but also its placement at the optimal moment of teacher-school relations, the method of conversation made possible the emergence of the moments by which the children remained close to me. According to the particularities of the secondary school students, we organized conversations that were meant to invite intimacy and relaxation, but at the same time, to the continuity, in order to record the child's livelihoods. During the process of the conversation, I did not write down anything about the children's approach, but later on I formed the protocol of the discussion. The disadvantage of this method derives from the possible failure of the subject's receptivity, its subjectivity, and in this respect it is necessary for the data to be completed and verified by other methods.

The case study method involves presenting the case, analyzing it, proposing solutions and testing them, applying the optimal and efficient solution. The "case study" method refers to individual behaviour throughout the social framework, focusing on data analysis and on their unitary presentation as relevant variables necessary for understanding the knowledge.

On the whole, one may consider that we have used a category of methods for describing and measuring the various aspects and manifestations of the pedagogical act in the current context. The fundamental aspect of the tools included in this group is the recording of data and findings after they have occurred. Thus, it is possible to obtain an inventory of these data which will allow the diagnosis of the manifestations and, implicitly, the improvement of the educational activity.

The method of analyzing school activity products. In terms of this method, it is possible to research the pupils' school performance and the various activities it involves. The analysis of the activities products carried out by the students gave me some important clues about the characteristics of observation, the ability to observe, understanding and mental development, the volume and accuracy of knowledge, the ability to put them into practice, general and special skills, general and specific creativity saddle. Of particular importance is the analysis of the products made by students in their leisure activities.

They show the motivational orientation characteristic of schoolchildren, as well as the interest they have in studying Romanian language and literature.

Research Tools

In order to get information about the pupils' personality, their level of knowledge and skills, their behaviours and their involvement in the educational process, we used as research tools:

– pedagogical knowledge tests;

Most of these instruments have been taken over and adapted to the content of the pupils, the particularities of the pupils and the objectives in question.

5.2. Experimental stage. Testing

The initial stage helps to establish the level at which pupils are at the moment of initiation of the psycho-pedagogical experiment, both in the experimental sample and in the control sample.

Table 1

The results obtained at the initial test by the experimental sample

The results are distributed as following:

Average at the class level is of the form: (1×0+2×0+3×3+4×1+5×5+6×3+7×2+8×1+9×0+10×0):15= 5.20

Module (the most frequent mark) is represented by mark 5

Table 2

Nominal table with the scores obtained at the initial test by the experimental sample

Analyzing the results obtained by 15 of the 19 pupils of the grade A, respectively the experimental sample, at the initial test, we can say that the module at the group level is 5, 11 grades being scored over the mark 5. In the same context, one may observe a grouping of marks on a fairly large segment.

Observing the graph above, there is a lack of 1 and 2 marks which suggests that the tendencies of promotion are increasing, but there is a deficit of 9 and 10 marks that suggests the poor involvement of pupils in the teaching-learning process. Also, since no student has fully achieved the objectives proposed by the didactic approach, it is easy to understand that success can only be achieved in the future by longer training and by giving more attention and importance to the discipline.

Table 3

Results obtained at the initial test by the control sample

The results are distributed as follows:

Average at the class level has the following form: (1×0+2×0+3×2+4×3+5×3+6×2+7×3+8×2+9×2+10×0):17= 5,88

Module (the most frequent note) is represented by the marks: 4, 5 and 7

Table 4

Nominal table with the marks obtained at the initial test by the control group

According to the graphs and tables above, the representative sample of the control group ranges around marks 4, 5 and 7. In this context, in the grade B there were 12 marks over 5, also observing here a grouping of marks on an extended segment. Also, the fact that marks 1 and 2 are missing suggests an upward trend in the promise of the initial test, but on the other hand, the absence of the mark 10 can be attributed to the lack of student concentration. Under the same aspect, no student has fully achieved the objectives proposed by the didactic approach.

According to the results obtained by the students of the experimental and control groups, the following measures for optimizing the didactic approach can be considered:

• Returning with additional information in the field where a deficit is found

• To propose new exercises and text that pupils should analyze from this perspective

• Insisting on resolving exercises of the type corresponding to the initial test

Observing the structural diagram of the averages obtained at the level of the two classes in the context of the initial test, it is noted that the control group is relatively higher compared to the experimental group. One may observe in this context an initial phase of the finding, also known as the initial test, the context in which the starting dates were collected, the level existing at the time of initiation of the secondary experience with which the English language teacher works. Interpreting the results and the information obtained from the pedagogical knowledge test, the analysis of the pupils' products, their systematic observation and the learning outcomes, one may found that there are no very large differences regarding the two samples, as the above diagram emphasizes.

In the context of administering the initial test at the level of the two samples, the following general and specific competencies are noted:

General, social and civic competencies

1. Receiving the written message, from literary and non-literary texts, for various purposes;

2. The correct and appropriate use of the English language in the production of written messages, in different contexts of realization, with different purposes.

Specific targeted competencies

1.1 reading a variety of literary or non-literary texts, demonstrating the understanding of their meaning;

1.2. Recognizing the specific modalities of organizing the different types of texts and;

1.3. Knowing the correctness and expressive value of the learned grammar and lexical categories in a text;

2.1. Expressing in writing their own opinions and attitudes;

2.2. The correct and nuanced use of learned semantic categories;

2.3. Use varied modalities for expressing the text.

5.3. Post-experimental stage. Evaluation/ Conclusions

The final experimental stage of this research was the administration of a final evaluation test, the subjects being the same for both classes, experimental and control ones. Subsequently, the results recorded in this context were compared with those obtained from the initial assessment.

As far as the evaluation of the results is concerned, it was possible with the help of the notes, to set the total score for each item. The next step was to compare the results obtained by each class in terms of comparison charts and those that reveal the structure.

In the context of the final stage, the following general and specific competencies were considered:

General, social and civic competencies

1. Receiving the written message, from literary and non-literary texts, for various purposes;

2. The correct and appropriate use of the English language in the production of written messages, in different contexts of realization, with different purposes.

Specific targeted competencies

1.1 reading a variety of literary or non-literary texts, demonstrating the understanding of their meaning;

1.2. Recognizing the specific modalities of organizing the epic text and the expressive procedures in the lyrical text;

1.3. Knowing the correctness and expressive value of the learned grammar and lexical categories in a text;

2.1. Expressing in writing their own opinions and attitudes;

2.2. The correct and nuanced use of learned semantic categories;

2.3. Use varied modalities for expressing the text.

Table 5

The results obtained at the final test by the experimental sample

The results are distributed as following:

Average at the class level has the following form: (1×0+2×0+3×0+4×2+5×0+6×1+7×6+8×3+9×1+10×2):15= 7.26

Module (the most frequent note) is represented by the mark 7

Table 6

Nominal table with the marks obtained at the final test by the experimental class

Based on the graphs and tables representative for the results obtained by the experimental sample at the final test, it can be stated that the module was around the 7th mark, and in terms of the degree of advancement, this is a good one, 13 marks being recorded over the 5th mark. As well as in the case of the final test, a grouping of marks on a quite stretched beach is noted. In the same context, none of the marks 1, 2, 3 and 5 were recorded, and two pupils with mark 10 achieved the objectives that were initially proposed in the context of the didactic approach.

Table 7

Results obtained at the final test by the control sample

Table 8

Nominal table with the marks obtained at the final test by the control class

Analyzing the results obtained at the final test by the control sample, there is a presence of 14 marks over the 5th one. In this context, the module is represented by mark 5, observing a grouping of marks on a large beach.

Also in the case of the control group, marks such as 1, 2, 3 and 10 are missing, which means that none of the grade B pupils have fully achieved the objectives proposed during the didactic approach.

In this context, the main measures for optimizing the didactic approach at both levels are:

• Return with additional information

• To identify gaps in the context of the teaching-learning process in which pupils should be involved at maximum capacity

• Insist on solving the exercises similar to the ones received by the students at the final test

Observing the structural diagrams of the averages obtained at the level of the two samples in the context of the final test, it is noted that with respect to the experimental group, the average is higher compared to the control one.

The analysis and interpretation of the data and implicitly, of the obtained results suggests the presence of a positive trend aimed at improving the school results of the secondary level students in favour of both experimental and control samples. Moreover, this trend can not be exclusively attributed to the psychic and physical development of pupils, which is why we can assert that the initial hypothesis is confirmed. Using the interactive methods and techniques, both individually, by group and frontal, is the following:

• children have the ability to learn new knowledge with ease;

• the students' confidence in their ability to decode and comprehend the content, both individually and at group level, is observed;

• students show an increasing desire to be involved in the learning process and show no signs of fatigue as they engage willingly, freely, consciously, learning logically and actively;

• children have acquired a tinted language and enriched by various teaching methods;

The data suggests that there is a positive trend in improving student outcomes in favour of the experimental sample, in terms of transforming the teacher-student relationship into a democratic one, aligned with modern standards. Thus, students at the secondary cycle enjoy effective communication based on cooperation, mutual help, initiative and freedom, thanks to the factual methods used by the English teacher.

In this context, it can be said that the present study was a real challenge for me, in terms of an opportunity to study both the literature and the psycho-pedagogical type, to enrich and deepen my knowledge regarding interactive methods and phenomena characterized by complexity, but topical and vital for the future. In the case of the two samples studied in this research it was found that in the first experimental phase, the differences between the average are statistically relative, the balance inclining towards the control sample, but as the experimental intervention is unfolding, one may observe remarkable differences between environments, on this occasion favouring the experimental group. This is due to the fact that the dynamics of the school performance, which the experimental group follows, contributes to the decrease of the difference between the media to the inflection point, after which the difference between the averages in favour of the experimental sample follows an ascending trend.

The qualitative and quantitative comparative approaches between the two groups (experimental and control) reinforce the assertion that the ascending evolution of the school performance of the experimental sample is strongly influenced by the final experimental intervention.

CONCLUSIONS

The experimental investigation supports the intention to verify the extent to which the use of interactive teaching methods and of the modern educational means in the teaching of English Language and Literature in the secondary classes has a particular influence on the achievement of the students' superior performances in terms of the positive impact these methods especially in the field of effective and conscious learning, but also as regards the intention to identify the limits of the use of these methods, in order to develop their mental lexicon.

The research deals with a current issue, framed in the new orientations of contemporary pedagogy, aiming in particular at replacing the grading methodologies and differentiating ones that support the individualization and the personalization of the educational process, offering equal opportunities to all students regardless of their level, thus promoting various methods with a high training potential that can lead to the optimization of the action taken by the students in the context of their own learning.

The approach taken in the present research presents clarifying and argumentative aspects, supporting the idea that the interactive methods promoted systematically and with pedagogical relevance in didactic activity have positive effects on school performance at the level of secondary classes.

Appreciating the results obtained from the investigative approach, it can be confirmed that the teaching of English Language and Literature to the secondary classes using modern educational means and interactive methods has significant positive effects, both in the formative segment and in the information plan.

The design and development of the pedagogical experiment was carried out from the perspective of optimizing the teaching and learning process of the English Language and Literature in the secondary classes, the exigency of the systematic use of interactive methods regarding the formation and the development of the fundamental competences, in the dynamics of school performance segment. The pedagogical intervention was carried out in the context of the English language didactic activities at the level of the A and B grades. The two samples (experimental and control) were selected according to the methodology of pedagogical research while respecting the compatibility with the various requirements imposed by the objectives and the hypothesis of the formative experiment.

With regard to the content sample, its delimitation was possible by the potential of capitalizing on the formative valences that modern and interactive didactic methods have, appreciating also the extent to which the content contributes to the learning and development of the understanding, using the concepts and specific terms of the discipline of study, exploration and investigation capacity of reality. Thus, the content sample covers a significant part of the contents of the English Language.

The formative experiment was the fundamental stage of this pedagogical research, at which level the didactic activities did take place at the secondary classes, according to the intervention project. The processing and interpretation of experimental data, referring to specific hypotheses, makes it easier to outline future conclusions.

Using interactive methods makes it possible to create a logical and natural chain between old and new knowledge; didactic units are not separate sequences, but they are inter-conditioned in a training situation, contributing to an optimal understanding of them, as they capitalize and activate the previous knowledge of students.

As expected, conducting this experimental research has given me the opportunity to see new perspectives to develop students’ mental lexicon, address other possible themes or subtopics, set new objectives and, implicitly, distinct working hypotheses, use innovative assessment tools and advanced data analysis techniques. In the same context, the process of collecting and analyzing data has given me the opportunity to know the various limits of research.

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ANNEXES

INITIAL TEST

Complete the gaps

Fill the gaps with the correct word below.

capital; cuisines; Queen; languages; buildings; artists; free

London is the …………….city of England situated on the bank of the River Thames. It is an old and historic city with many famous ……, parks and places of interest to visit. Many tourists go to Buckingham Palace, where the ………. lives, as it is one of the most recognisable places in the city. 

There are also many museums and galleries and many of them include …….. entry. Some of the world's most famous ……… exhibit their artwork in London's galleries. 

London is also a multicultural city with people from all over the world. Hundreds of different …………are spoken and you can find a wide range of ………… to eat and enjoy. Many international festivals are also celebrated throughout the year in this truly global city.

Select the correct answer

1) It is        today.

Cold

Dark

Nice

Rich

2) There is a        on the table.

ball

pen

book

hat

3) A        is an animal.

ball

cat

hat

house

4) What are the cats doing?

They sleep

They are sleeping

They sleeping

They are sleep

5) Whose house is this?

It is Anne's house.

Is Anne's house

She is Anne's house

He's Anne's house

6) My brother        2 years old.

have

are

has

is

7) Who are they?

Kate and Peter are they students.

They are Kate and Peter students.

It is a student Kate and Peter.

Kate and Peter are students.

8) Can I have three        of coffee, please?

glasses

cups

saucers

bottles

9) She's got two        for the theatre tonight.

cards

menus

tickets

passports

10) There aren't        good restaurants in this town.

any

the

some

a

Complete the following sentences with the appropriate form of the verb in brackets.

If you (wash)…………..the dishes, I (cook)………… dinner tonight.

If my mother (have)………..time next week, we (paint)……………. my sister’s room.

James (learn)……………. a lot about Romanian history if he (visit)…………..the rural area.

If the weather (be / not) ………………..too bad tomorrow, we (play) ………………..football.

Mary and Angela (get / not) ……………..there on time if they (catch / not)……………….the train.

FINAL TEST

Gap Fill: films

Fill the gaps with the correct word from the box.

director; action; cast; special effects; actor; trailer

Top of Form

1. Tom Hanks is my favourite ………. in Hollywood.

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

2. There is a new horror film opening tomorrow night. I saw the …………… on the internet and it looks really scary.

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

3.  I'm not interested in the actors. I always choose a film for its …………….. .

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

4. There are lots of crashes and explosions in this latest …………………..film.

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

5. I love the ……………. in sci-fi films, they look so real!

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

6. The …………….. is the group of actors that star in a film.

II. Select the correct answer

1) Are these Martin's shoes?

No, it is mine

No, they're mine

No, they're for me

No, they're my

2) That bird can        beautifully.

Sings

Song

Is singing

Sing

3) I        see you tomorrow.

Will

Am

Go

Was

4) Are you going to        that bicycle?

Go

Drive

Cycle

Ride

5) She decided to        the long dress.

Put

Do

Wear

Have

6) My hands are       . I must wash them.

Crazy

Dirty

Happy

Tired

7) He won't go into the river. He's        of the water.

Feared

Frightened

Fearing

Frightening

8)        you close the door, please?

Do

Could

Did

May

9) What        next week?

did you do

do you do

are you doing

are you do

10) I made a sandwich       .

so I was hungry

for I was hungry

must I was hungry

because I was hungry

11) My hair is very wet. Have you got a       ?

towel

bath

shirt

shower

12) If you're        you can have some lemonade.

Dry

Thirsty

Hungry

Angry

13) What's the        of that mountain?

tall

high

height

big

III. Complete the following sentences using the correct form.

If you need the car in the morning, I go/ will go/ would go/ went shopping in the afternoon.

If I wear/ will wear/ would wear/ wore a long coat, I would look like an old fashioned man.

I'll buy this dress if they have/ will have/ would have/ had it in pink.

Mary wouldn't pay with the credit card if she have/ will have/ would have/ had a credit card.

If I didn't have you, I do not know/ will not know/ would not know/ did not know what to do.