engleski

Using Diverse Source Materials as a Springboard for Efficient Acquisition of Election Vocabulary

There is undoubtedly a huge impact of elections on most spheres of public life and their outcome appears to be potentially relevant to one's personal life. Their omnipresence is obvious not only within single societies in which they occur, but also due to the fact that nowadays their importance tends to be mirrored cross-culturally. In point of fact, by means of the mass media people are exposed to an enormous amount of information related to elections happening home and abroad, which makes them a global issue. What is more, this semantic field is of crucial importance for future journalists, diplomats and political scientists who are expected to gain competences for professional presenting and analyzing electoral processes in the course of their studies. In acquiring specialized vocabulary related to elections, university students have traditionally been provided with a strictly denotative meaning for each lexeme, mainly via ESP teacher's explanations and/or by their using bilingual dictionaries. As a result, culturally specific connotative meaninags (e.g. "carousel" voters, crazy parties, etc.) have often eluded students' attention as words were deprived of a fascinating variety of different contexts that determine their use in real-life utterances. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate how a wide range of diverse English- language (non-)authentic source materials (scientific texts, newspaper articles, audiovisual material, easy-to-understand dictionary definitions, to name but a few) can all be employed in order to enhance students' acquisition of items of this lexical domain, providing them with collocations typical of the words in question, mainly through the actual up-to-date context, thus allowing students to grasp not only semantic but also syntactic features of a new word/expression. It is presumed that such an open approach will enhance not only students' language competence but also bolster their self-confidence about their future capability for grappling with professional texts in English.

connotative meaning, elections, up-to-date context, vocabulary acquisition

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