The Application Of Narrow Reading To Senior High School Vocabulary Teaching

For some senior high school students,vocabulary is the first problem which needs to be solved in learning English.How to make senior high school students learn vocabulary efficiently and how to make them learn vocabulary willingly are the questions in English teaching.Narrow reading makes learners study vocabulary through passages of the same topic.As the topic of each passage is the same,the vocabulary involved will appear repeatedly in the passage,and learners’ vocabulary can be increased effectively.The purpose of this paper is to apply narrow reading to high school reading class to understand its role in high school English vocabulary acquisition and to study whether it can improve students’ motivation and interest in learning vocabulary.52 students taught by the author are chosen to participate in this empirical study.The 52 students are divided into two groups,26 for the narrow reading group,another 26 for the control group.There is basically no difference in vocabulary size between the two groups,as shown by a word test conducted to the two groups of students.In this research,the materials of the narrow reading group are chosen from college entrance examination,containing a large number of repeated vocabularies which need to be mastered in high school learning.There are five topics for narrow reading group,namely,travel and traffic,literature and art,sports,environment protection and interests.Each topic contains 10 passages.The materials of the control group are randomly selected.In this study,vocabulary proficiency tests and vocabulary acquisition tests are used,and some students are also interviewed to know the change of their interest in learning vocabulary.Results of the study show that the narrow reading group has developed well in vocabulary learning.They have acquired a significantly larger number of words than the control group.Narrow reading also motivates students’ willingness to learn vocabulary.Based on the experimental results some suggestions are also provided for teachers on how to carry out effective vocabulary teaching,teachers should pay attention to the differences of students,choose reading materials well,allow students to accumulate related background knowledge of articles,and encourage students to extend reading beyond the classroom.