The Role of Teaching Vocabulary to Enhance Foreign Language Learners’ Writing Skill

Abstract

Vocabulary is the body of words that make up a language, and its importance in improving the writing skill should be overstated because without ample knowledge of words and their meanings, written communication will be poorly understood. In addition to this. learners’ paucity in vocabulary knowledge may be resourced to the strategies that teachers use to teach new words in their lessons. Therefore, the present study focuses on the role of teaching various vocabulary strategies to first-year students of English at Biskra University. The purpose of using such strategies is to enhance the students’ competence in English vocabulary and to improve the students’ academic achievement in the writing skill. Another aim for this research is to bring the teachers’ awareness about the importance of teaching the vocabulary strategies. So, as a first step we put forward one fundamental hypothesis, if first year students of English are taught some strategies of vocabulary, their achievement in the writing skill will be enhanced. To confirm this hypothesis we relied on the descriptive method in order to find the relationship between the dependent and independent variables which are mentioned above. Questionnaire is the data gathering tool of this research. The obtained results are found to be highly significant because the results of the analysis of the students’ questionnaire revealed that there is a serious gap on first-year students of English with vocabulary competence. Also teachers of written expression have claimed that their learners have a difficulty with vocabulary mastery. As a result of this, writing in the foreign language seems as a difficult task for first-year students to do. This leads us to confirm that if teachers are aware of the advantages of the vocabulary teaching strategies as stated in the hypothesis, students may overcome some of their inability to write.