The Effects of Semantics in the Language Development of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learners

Abstract

The study of Semantics is an important area of word meaning, references, senses, logic, and perlocutions and illocutions. That is, the study of Semantics increases students’ understanding and awareness of word meaning, sentence relationships, and discourse and context. It also enables students to create and improve their Semantics maps which are webs of words visually display the meaning-based connections between a word or phrase and a set of related words or concepts. This paper is a product of effort that I make to implement some theoretically-sound strategies in planning and teaching a Semantic course for English Foreign language learners (EFL). The aim of this paper is to show that utilizing the mechanisms of meaning is vital to successful human communication. Alongside with that, lexical development will solidify students’ understanding of language meaning and sense relations. The purpose of the course is to concentrate on teaching key terms in Semantics, Semantics Analysis of Writing Approach (SAW) and ‘agent-action-goal with real-life action’ technique and then employed the knowledge of these terms to improve students’ vocabulary in the short-term, and their language proficiency in the long-term. Scaffolding the Semantics information with L2 vocabulary strategies is pivotal in language development. Implementing semantics strategies in an attempt to expose the relationship between teaching Semantics and improving ELLs’ language skills.