STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING There has been a trend in recent years to develop more self-acces materials, and in the classroom

a desire to shift the focus away from the teacher and concentrate on more studentcentered activities. This not only makes the student more responsible for his own learning but also permits greater attention to individual needs. These developments are very relevant to vocabulary teaching. After elementary level, it becomes increasingly difficult for the teacher to select vocabulary that will be equaly useful to all his students. This difficulty is compounded in the case of the teachers working in an english-speaking country as their students come from different countries and learning backgrounds. Placement tests may group students in terms of lexical volume but there will still remain significant differences in actual content. Thus time spent teaching new vocabulary may wasted on some of the group, even if as teachers we often justify this by calling it revision. The need for the teacher to take responsibility for the selection of items on the students behalf, not only because of the teachers greater knowledge of the language, but also because of his central role in appreciating and integrating the different needs of the classmembers. However, for the items the teacher provides, the learner can go on to select even more rigorously in accordane with his own knowledge and needs. Attention to individual needs is not only reason for ecouraging diferent approaches to vocabulary teaching. We know from experience that unanticipated lexical items inevitably surface during the course of a lesson, and with the constant clamour for definitions and explanations it is very easy for the focus to shift back almost entirely to the teacheras he produces on-the-spot answers to these questions. Carried to extemes, this leaves the teacher very vulnerable to the criticism of dominating the lesson. If we acknowledge that such intervention on the part involve making use of traditional approaches to vocabulary teaching, ther is growing case for designing more studentcentered activities for intended lexical imput. Recent developments have emphasised the importance of equipping students with the necessary strategies for dealing with skills activities. In the learning of vocabulary involves: 1. Asking others 2. Using dictionary 3. Making use of the context to deduce meaning and guessing from item itself. We are not going to examine these strategies in more detail. I each case we eill look at examples of activities which attempt to integrate the presentation of new lexis with a useful learning strategy, and allow the learner some autonomy. ASKING OTHERS A student can ask the teacher or another students to explain the meaning of an item which he has just encountered. Conversely, there are occasions when a students finds that he wants to use a particular item but does not know how to say it in English. The best strategy is for the students to make the context sufficiently clear so that the listener can then provide the student with the word he is looking for. For example: my hands are very cold so I want to buy some (the speaker would probably also use mime to clarify.) a native speaker listening to this could provide the word gloves. A teacher might proceed by distributing copies of the sheet and asking students to write the names of any items they already know. At this stage, students will be working individually.it would then be useful to teach the structure, what is the thing you use for (+gerund)? To enable the students to go on to ask each other about any of the items they do not know. The teacher will need to monitor carefully to clarify meaning, check pronunciation and spelling and supply the correct answer where necessary, but otherwise the activity can be entirely student- centred the amount of intervention by the teacher while monitoring will clearly depend on the teacher himself , the hability of the groups to work well together and the accuracy of the information exchange . the teacher may well decide to have a final feedback session with the class to ensure that the activity has been effective in supplying accurate information. To ask about other items which they do not know in English and which they would like to know. .

USING DICTIONARY If the students has no teacher or peer to task, he can still solve a number of problems by using a dictionary. This could be a dictionary specially written for foreign students or a bilingual dictionary . The advantages of using dictionaries are: -that a learner who makes good use of a dictionary will be able to continue learning outside the classroom and this will give him considerable autonomy about the decisions he makes about his own learning. -is a valuable support as a backup to contextual guesswork . -in such cases is an important resource to clarify the uncertainty. Example: He went to a school were the policy was to allow students to make their own decisions about whether or not to attend lessons.They were actively encouraged to consider this carefully.In his particular case he loafed for three years before he made up his mind to go to the car maintenance class. In this example by contextual guesswork loafed might mean to do nothing or to consider , but sometimes is imposible to use the contextual guesswork, so the dictionary help us to solve the ambiguity and clarify the meaning. Another feature of a foreign learners dictionary which make it a useful aid is the use of phonemic transcription and stress marking, which help students not only to get the meaning but also give them about the pronunciation of words. Example: drive /draiv/ And one disadvantage of the use of dictionary is that in some cases,some bilingual dictionaries which do little more than give one word equivalents and are often very innacurate. CONTEXTUAL GUESSWORK This involves making use of the context in wich the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning, or in some cases to guess from the word itself. Consider the new lexis enconuntered by an intermediate student in the following examples: I overslept this morning My work varies from week to week. In the first example the new word comprises parts that are already familiar . in the second one students knowledge of the more common noun variety may be enough. When the target word is clearly isolated, one can approach denser text in wich a wider context needs to be understood before the meaning of a single item surfaces:e. g. The newspaper has suffered during the past year because advertising money has fallen by ten per cent. However, this fall has been offset by increasing the price of the paper from 20 pence to 22 pence. Offset here means: (a) made worse, (b) made better, (c) balanced. This example ilustrates the importance of understanding discourse possible to guess the meaning even if we distract the students by sourrounding the target item with more unknow vocabulary. Other students may have considerable difficulty with this type of task and would need to hve the skill developed more gradually. Contextual guesswork it is not introduced into the lesson when other skills are being developed.