Abstract:

Enlarging students’ potential vocabulary has proved a source of language guess, replenishment of their passive and active vocabulary, enhancement of paper, audio and visual text understanding. The relevance of the research also lies in the importance of teaching foreign language phraseological units in secondary education, despite the limited time resources and low language skills, since the reflection of material and spiritual culture in linguistic units is constantly attracting scientists’ attention.

The object of the study is the process of teaching a foreign language in secondary education.

The subject of the study is the process of enlarging students’ potential vocabulary on the basis of phraseological units study in the English classroom.

The purpose is to design and implement a complex of tasks to enlarge students’ potential vocabulary on the basis of phraseological units study in the English classroom.

Through such theoretical methods as analysis of methodological, pedagogical and psychological literature on the research topic, synthesis of pedagogical experience, comparison of different approaches and classifications, the essence of the concept of "potential vocabulary" was determined and certain structural and compositional features were identified. A potential vocabulary is a collection of "potential words" whose meaning is obtained by a linguistic guess. A potential vocabulary is a set of such words that are used in the language, but do not belong to students’ active and passive vocabulary. Occupying a special place in the learning process, a potential vocabulary depends on the level of a lexical skill, when the student recognizes and memorizes a new word, replenishing the active and passive vocabulary.

The study hypothesized that enlarging students’ potential vocabulary in teaching English is more effective on the basis of working with phraseological units.

Why can the study of phraseological units be a good way to develop a potential vocabulary? All phraseological units have a cultural component, that is, they reflect the national picture of the world and the national mentality, and they are an important tool for gaining knowledge about the specifics of the studied culture. Therefore, teaching how to understand phraseological units will help to develop language guesswork and a sense of language i.e. it will contribute to enlarging students’ potential vocabulary in the English classroom.

To ensure achieving the research goal, a complex of tasks consisting of a hierarchical sequence of stages was elaborated and implemented in the course of experimental training. In the case of phraseological units, the most difficult stage of defining the semantics considers translational and non-translational methods that develop a potential vocabulary. Determining the meaning of a phraseological unit with a linguistic guess is possible in one of the following ways based on an intra language guess, an inter language guess, an extra linguistic guess.

The developed complex of tasks was tested in the course of experimental work, which proved its effectiveness and confirmed the assumption of the need for targeted work to enlarge students’ potential vocabulary.

Keywords:

Potential vocabulary, enlarging students’ potential vocabulary, language guess, phraseological units study, a complex of tasks.