Games Of Antonymic Pairs In The Language Of Finance And Accounting

A primary objective of teaching Business English is students' familiarization with specific terminology and acquisition of lexical structures and elements of vocabulary that shall then be needed by them in order to properly function in the field of their specialization, to communicate, understand discourse and authentic texts and produce correct communication in their turn. Thus, one of the language teachers' concern in this respect is to provide sufficient didactic support so as to assure a high level of assimilation of linguistic material. To appeal to mnemotechnics is only common in vocabulary teaching. Association of words on diverse criteria - semantic, lexical, linguistic or of other nature -, discussion of words in contrastive comparisons, visual aids given by various classification methods or by simply arranging terms on the page, in tables, boxes etc. or writing them in a distinct manner, using a different style, font, character a.s.o., work on and with the terms in game type activities - are all such means of vocabulary reinforcement. This article exemplifies how terminology of the economic fields of finance and accounting can be used in some quite appealing activities implying refreshment and use of knowledge from several linguistic areas - from vowels and consonants to semantic pairs of contextual antonyms. Such activities involve and make use of related aspects - from the fields of linguistics and semantics - but have as final goal reinforcement of the vocabulary units that makes the very base of the material prepared for the activities (the drills proper). These represent a mere model of how teachers and instructors of language can themselves play with the words and create interesting activities to bring more attractive material to the class so as to stimulate participation and improve an otherwise mundane approach that is generally supposed with the introduction of and dealing with business terminology.