All means employed in presenting, fixing and testing the linguistic materials constitute teaching techniques. In the process
of teaching, it is rather important to keep the three aspects of teaching apart, even if certain techniques (films, tapes, some types of drills and exercises) can be employed in all three. Thus, even if some of the means overlap, in each aspect similar media is used for different purposes.
Presentation is the process of getting the language into the mind of the learners via the didactic text. Presentation involves spoken forms and written forms. Presentation of spoken forms involves lessons in pronunciation and in systematic imitation of the model (the teacher or recorder materials). These lessons embrace teaching the learners to distinguish the phonemes of English; teaching the learners to recognize the phonemes of English in words and sentences as well as to recognize words and sentences themselves; and imitation.
Interrelated with the presentation of form is the presentation of meaning. Speech is a stream of sounds in which the semantic system is continually interrelated with grammatical and phonological systems. The technique of conveying the meaning of the presented forms is one of the most important issues in the process of teaching. Four kinds of procedures can be distinguished in connection with getting the meaning across:
1. differential,
2. ostensive,
3. pictorial,
4. contextual.
As researchers began to specify more precisely the parameters of vocabulary knowledge, more accurate and consistent estimates of vocabulary size were generated. Even as methodological improvements in vocabulary research have occurred, one unequivocal finding has remained Students with poor vocabularies know alarmingly fewer words than students with rich vocabularies. One of the most alarming patterns in terms of vocabulary-growth differences between students is that important differences are apparent regardless of how early vocabulary is measured, sometimes as early as when students begin school.