Teaching Vocabulary at EPP Classes: Traditional Ways and New Accents

The paper deals with the topical issue of teaching vocabulary at English for Professional Purposes (EPP) classes.It analyses topical approaches to vocabulary teaching proposed by researchers such as T. Dudley-Evans, M. St. John, M. Costeleanu and Y. Hunchenko, who focus on the structure of professional vocabulary, its minimum volume for effective communication, as well as the stages and methods of teaching it.It is noted that professional vocabulary is characterised by thematic and stylistic specificity, the presence of a large number of terms, abbreviations, and sometimes professional slang.The paper outlines the traditional approach to vocabulary teaching in EPP, which includes three main stages: selection, presentation, and practical assimilation of lexical units.Particular attention is paid to methods of semanticisation without translation and contextualisation, which contribute to a deeper understanding and longer-term memorisation of vocabulary.These methods include verbal, visual, and logical-visual means of presenting material.The author suggests improving the traditional approach by integrating elements of other foreign language teaching methods, in particular the communicative approach, which consists in using FUMP model, CLIL and its idea of functional types of language and the scaffolding principle, the lexical approach, studying chunks -fixed word combinations: collocations, binominals, trinominals, idioms, similes, connectives, social-routine formulae, discourse makers, compounds, proverbs etc., and text based instruction taking into account the genre variety of professional discourse.Such integration allows expanding the context of use of lexical units, activating students' linguistic intuition, and increasing the effectiveness of professional vocabulary acquisition.The results of the study may be used by English teachers working in the field of professional training, as well as for developers of EPP training programs.