Questão de Língua Inglesa

Text II: What is vocabulary? Vocabulary can be defined, roughly, as the words we teach in the foreign language. However, a new item of vocabulary may be more than a single word: for example, post office and mother-in-law, which are made up of two or three words but express a single idea. There are also multi-word idioms such as call it a day, where the meaning of the phrase cannot be deduced from an analysis of the component words. A useful convention is to cover all such cases by talking about vocabulary ‘items’ rather than ‘words’. (UR, P. A course in language teaching: practice and theory. 9.. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).