On The Application Of The Lexical Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Vocabulary is one of the three main elements which constitute the language, Wilkins (1972) stated that,"While without grammar little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed."Vocabulary is of vital importance in the process of language learning. Since the 1970s the research on the vocabulary acquisition gradually began to be widely concerned, and some researchers began to turn their attention to the acquisition of vocabulary.On the discussion of the ability of learning vocabulary, Nation (1997) made a distinction between the receptive vocabulary and the productive vocabulary. The former refers to the words which can be understood in the receptive linguistic activities such as listening and reading. The latter refers to the words which can be used in the productive linguistic activities such as speaking and writing.It is of much importance on how to enlarge the vocabulary and improve the expressive level of vocabulary, however, yet the vocabulary teaching didn't get enough attention it should be given in the English class. There are two reasons for this phenomenon: firstly, people are lack of the recognition of the importance of the vocabulary; secondly, there is no effective approach in teaching vocabulary.The lexical approach is one of the most popular teaching approaches abroad. It holds that the teacher should focus the students'attention on the learning of the words and poly-words, collocations, institutional expressions, and sentence frames and heads.The author applied the lexical approach into the English vocabulary teaching, and raised two hypotheses: 1): The lexical approach can help the students with the acquisition of English vocabulary. 2): The lexical approach has different effects on the acquisition of receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary, and specifically,it has more effect on the acquisition of productive vocabulary.Firstly, the author investigated the teaching and learning methods of English vocabulary in some vocational colleges with a questionnaire. Secondly, the author implemented a comparative experiment to verify whether the lexical approach can aid the acquisition of English vocabulary, and whether it has more effect on the acquisition of productive vocabulary compared with receptive vocabulary. The author analyzed the statistics of the pre-test and the post-test by SPSS17.0. The results showed that both the receptive and the productive vocabulary scores of the two groups have risen obviously, the receptive vocabulary scores of the experimental group and control group were similar after the experiment, and the productive vocabulary score of the experimental group was higher than the score of the control group.The conclusions of this thesis are: the lexical approach can help students with the acquisition of English vocabulary and it has more effect on the acquisition of productive vocabulary compared with the receptive vocabulary. At last, the author pointed out the limitations of the study and gave some suggestions for further studies.