Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Ciencias del Lenguaje


Semantics:
The importance of Semantics in language teaching




Daniela Moreno







San Nicolás de los Garza, N.L. May 20th 2015
The importance of semantics in language teaching
Working with a language different than the native one is not an easy thing to do, whether from the view of the learner or the view of the teacher. As a student it is hard learning to master a new language as it has different rules of usage and pronunciation, new elements that don’t exist in the other language and, something really important, different ways of communicating meaning. From the teacher’s perspective it is a hard work making sure your students are really learning the target language, and also finding the correct ways of transmitting the knowledge they need in order to be proficient on it. Having thought about these issues on both student’s and teacher’s work we come to reflect about the possible solutions to them. That is when semantics appears to us; not only because of its theory but also because of how it can be applied to support these needs. 
Semantics has been defined as “the historical and psychological study and classification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic development “  with more simple words we can describe it as the study of the meaning of the words and phrases existing in a language. As being able to communicate in any language requires a great capacity to transmit messages and to reason about the meaning of what a text is trying to convey or what someone is telling us, we need some tools to support this process of learning to be proficient which will be given precisely by semantics. Without really knowing we have been working with some elements given by it, first as students in our language books and then as teachers, just as the establishment of lexical relations, factors helping the acquisition of concepts, concepts explaining why it is sometimes hard to get the meaning of a word, etc.
As teachers we will have to deal with the teaching of concepts, and from semantics we can take aspects by which we can represent these concepts, such as prototypes that support us in locating a concept in a category, based on how much the concept belongs to it, and the exemplars which help us to recall the memories of our students when we are trying to explain a concept. All these elements are represented on the books we use to teach the target language and whether if they aren’t, we can make use of prototypes and exemplars to facilitate the students’ creation of mental connections among the words, and the possible ways they can organize them. Another important tool we can make use from semantics is the establishment of lexical relations, aspect that I consider is the most used on language teaching. Such lexical relations, homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, etc; are represented on textbooks allowing students not only to know how words can relate to others, but also to increase their vocabulary.
It is important to realize all semantic components when applied can improve the ability to communicate meaning and the understanding of the different combinations that can be made with the elements of a language. Of course these applications of semantics described above are not the only ones that can be used in the hard work that teaching represents. It is only matter of how much attention we give as teachers to the learning our students have, and how well informed we are of all the possible help instruments that exist around linguistics science. Finally I must say even not all the persons know about the importance and the place semantics has on the teaching of a language, placing itself at the level of other fields such as phonology, phonetics or grammar, its indirect appearance on the textbooks and learning theories makes clear how important and how supportive it is when becoming a speaker of language.
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