The Value of Effective Strategies Employed in Vocabulary Instruction in College English Reading

Vocabulary teaching is one aspect of language teaching that has not been given the attention it deserves until recent years. For a long period of time, vocabulary is simply taught in the way by asking students to study and memorize its meaning and spelling, its part of speech and its general function in a sentence. Thus, a student with a command of five thousand English vocabulary still finds it hard to adapt himself to the requirement of our demanding reading assignments, in particular, to the extensive reading task, which is more demanding due to its wide range of materials and large amount of vocabularies. According to Wilkins (1979: 111) "Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." Yet without a deeper understanding of how vocabulary is taught in the classroom and which methods of teaching are more effective for learners, the teaching of vocabulary may not achieve the desired effects. By researching the topic on vocabulary learning and instruction, this essay intends to bring the attention of both teachers and learners to the weaknesses of the traditional approach of teaching vocabulary and some different strategies in vocabulary instruction with the aim of improving the students’ reading comprehension.\;