2. The best means of helping students retain new words is to teach them to draw the network of an associative field centered on a term that has specific meanings in the text. This drawing will show clearly the various relationships between the specific term and the other related words.
In an associative field, everything connected with the central word—its collocations①, situational sets, semantic sets and other associative ideas--can all be included, thereby forming a network.
Situational sets. Situational sets are cohesive chains of lexical relationships in discourse. For example, university, lecture room, lectern, library form a situational set. They are groups of words that are associated because of the subject of the text, its purpose or its construction, they are words related to a particular situation. The words in situational sets form one kind of element in the associative field.
Semantic sets: Semantic sets are words linked by such relationships as synonyms (sofa, couch, divan), antonyms (big, small; tall, short; rich, poor), coordinates (oak, elm, ginko), super ordinates (上限词 ) (horse, animal; carp, fish; rice, grain), subordinates(下限词) (fruit, pear; meat, pork; area of study, English), and stimulus- response pairs (关系组合) (accident, car; baby, mother). They contribute to the chains of associations and are another way of bringing words together.
3. It is more important for students to recognize certain sentence structures in reading and to use them in writing effortlessly than it is for them to remember only the forms of the sentence structure. Techniques that enhance recognition and production are to be centered on the function of the structure rather than on its form; that is, on the searching for appropriate structures to fit the particular occasion. That is why sentence structure may be best taught if the structure is connected with its function.