Vocabulary in the Approaches to Language Teaching: From the Twentieth Century to the Twenty-first

This study gives an overview of the nine twentieth-century approaches to language teaching and demonstrates how vocabulary teaching was regarded and what techniques were used to teach vocabulary in each of the approaches.The reasons of the emergence of a new approach to language teaching are pointed out for each approach as well.Finally, the current status of vocabulary teaching and the causes of debates among vocabulary researchers are discussed.It can be concluded that although a systematic and principled approach to teaching vocabulary has not yet been found, teaching vocabulary learning strategies explicitly has attracted the attention of many researchers around the world.