The Place and Importance of Synonyms and Antonyms Teaching in Language Acquisition

Nowadays it gains importance of teaching four basic skills (listening, speaking, writing and reading) and sub-skills (grammar, vocabulary and fonetic) in foreign language teaching. The action-oriented method that appears after 2000, focuses on teaching of four basic skills and sub-skills and it’s explained in the Common European Framework that is accepted as a guide in foreign language teaching. There are some problems in teaching of four basic skills. As it is indicated in the Common European Framework, one of the problems encountered during the teaching of four skills is vocabulary learning/teaching. So far, many word-learning strategies have been developed. One of the many methods and strategies that have been developed to overcome this difficulty is to improve vocabulary knowledge of students through teaching of antonyms in their both native language and target language and to provide the information that the students need to express themselves in the target language. Although there are many dictionaries and research studies on the teaching of synonyms and antonyms, there is only one Turkish-French synonym-antonym dictionary which is developed by Michelle Bozdemir. The present article will emphasize the importance of synonyms and antonyms in vocabulary teaching and contributions of synonyms and antonyms to foreign language students in acquiring vocabulary learning strategies.

Keywords

Teaching vocabulary, teaching antonyms and synonyms, the importance of teaching vocabulary in foreig