Scholarly record

A SOCIO-CULTURAL APPROACH TO VOCABULARY TEACHING STRATEGIES

Z.Vozgova, O. Afanasyeva

Abstract

In the given article the socio-cultural aspects of learning English as a foreign language are viewed. By taking a socio-cultural approach to vocabulary teaching strategies the authors argue that social mobility, globalization, and the Internet cause changes in pronunciation, orthography, grammar as well as vocabulary. As over 1400 entries from all around the world have been published in the Open Dictionary during 2016, it spawned Brexit-inspired forms (flexit, Nexit, Quitaly, Scexit); social media (virtue signaling, snowflake generation, egosurf) and lifestyle neologisms (bleisure, yo-yo dieting, yogalates); relationships coinages (promposal, p-phub, fauxmance); business and economy phenomena (one-percenter, elevator pitch, gig economy). Such ideas, alongside theories that show how cognitive development is mediated by social activity, give us the understanding that our knowledge of teaching students about culture and nationally biased lexicon needs to cover change, diversity, debates and disputes, etc. Culture in the classroom has to be language-focused and help teachers avoid confrontation and devise an appropriate philosophy and practice of language management in which Standard English and non-standard English are brought in mutually enlightening relationship.

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