Teaching Vocabulary Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Teaching Vocabulary - Essay Example Teaching Vocabulary demands the use of various strategies as not all the students have the same capabilities to understand and comprehend the foreign as well as local languages. The issue of teaching vocabulary of a foreign language becomes more complicated due to the common lack of understanding of the foreign language of the children. (Council) It also further depends as to how the children are willing to learn and what methods can effectively be used to teach the children in most optimum way so that the capabilities of the children are maximized. However large part of this learning depends upon the curriculum and various ideologies of curriculum adopted by the schooling systems to impart knowledge into the students. This further trickles down to the goals and objectives set by the teacher in teaching the class. Therefore the issue of teaching vocabulary and various methods of teaching it largely depend upon the way a teacher intends to follow the overall plan of teaching the students. This essay will look into the various strategies for teaching the vocabulary to the students however, before doing so we will be discussing various curriculum methodologies which are being followed in order to set stage for our final analysis of the situation. Curriculum Ideologies Curriculum ideologies are defined as beliefs about what schools should teach, for what ends, and for what reasons. (Lu). All schools have at least one ideology - and usually more than one - that provides direction to their functions. An ideology can be tacit rather than explicit. Curriculum is the way through which these different ideologies can be implemented. The curriculum refers to the content and purpose of an educational program together with their organization. Curriculum is one of developing knowledge through which it can be organized into subjects and fields for educational purposes. Curriculum is also a way to ask questions as to how the knowledge and learning are linked to particular educational purposes. It is because of this reason that curriculum is considered as a best tool for learning. As many pedagogues have noted in their work, both radical pedagogy and critical theory have struggled Sisyphus-like against the forces of vocationalization, corporatization, the instit utionalized Romantic Humanist educational curriculum, and the commodification of knowledge that currently plague institutes of learning today. Apart from that there was also an attempt to institutionalize the critical theory. In this issue, theorists and teachers discuss the practical difficulties in "transforming thinking and revising habitual ways of reading texts and reading the world in their students." (Spurlin) Ideological positions pertaining to curriculum and to other aspects of education exist in a state of tension or conflict. They are competing on what schools should teach and for what ends in a political marketplace. Regardless of how powerful an ideological view may be in an individual's or even group's orientation to the world, it is seldom adequate to determine what the school curriculum shall be. There is a political process that inevitably must be employed to move from ideological commitment to practical