Words and Scenes in a Didactic Lexicon

On of the major concerns in the tradition of foreign language teaching has been the question of how FL learners learn new vocabulary. This issue comprises two questions, i.e. how are FL words grasped in their complex meanings and how are they remembered? In this paper this dual issue is tackled by proposing the notion of a didactic lexicon, which is seen as an optimal presentation of word meanings. This contribution discusses Fillmore's 'Scenes-and-frame semantics' and the contextual approach to vocabulary learning and describes an experiment in contextual vocabulary learning and testing. A didactic lexicon is defined as a variabele set of lexical items explained in ordinary language, possibly with the help of visual materials or trans-lations, enabling the learner to build up the strongest possible associations between FL words and their prototypical scenes, and revealing the underlying structure of the lexicon of the FL. Finally some strategies for developing a 'didactic' lexicon are presented.