Study Of Semantic Association Strategies In Junior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Learning

The English Curriculum Standard for compulsory Education(2017 Edition)issued by the Ministry of Education has made a specific description to the English vocabulary learning level for junior high school students.Researchers have done a lot of research on the related topics of English vocabulary in the basic education stage.Vocabulary learning is one of the basic elements of language.Vocabulary learning is influenced not only by the students’ own English foundation,but also by many non-intellectual factors.Researchers at home and abroad have made some explorations on English vocabulary learning strategy(Wen Qiufang,1993;Ma Guanghui,2016;Meng Lingkun,2008).However,most of previous research on semantic association strategy are aimed at college students or senior high school students,and few are related to junior high school students.And the above-mentioned research methods on semantic association strategy are also mostly carried out by the experimental class and the control class,and few qualitative studies are carried out on individual cases.Therefore,this study uses qualitative research methods to study the effectiveness of semantic association strategy training for junior high school students.This paper uses interview,observation and content analysis to conduct an individual case study on the subjects,Qiqi,a junior high school student,acting as a research object to explore the effectiveness of semantic association strategy training.According to the results of the study,this paper puts forward some suggestions on how to train effective semantic association strategy and provides reference for teachers in English vocabulary teaching in order to guide students to use semantic association strategy to learn English vocabulary better.By analyzing the content of the data through Nvivo12.0,the following discoveries has been found: semantic association strategy training has an effective influenced on junior high school students’ English vocabulary learning,reflecting in the improvement in all aspects including English achievement,vocabulary learning level,vocabulary memory level vocabulary learning interest,vocabulary learning motivation,vocabulary learning emotion,vocabulary learning will and vocabulary learning strategy.The research suggests that the semantic association strategy training should be integrated into the English classroom teaching in junior high school.For this purpose,the teachers’ self-performance ability should be strengthened and the skills of strategy training should be mastered.While the teachers should strengthen the training of semantic association strategies to the students with learning difficulties.In addition,they should pay attention to cultivate the students’ awareness and emotional changes.Due to the limitation of the subjective and objective conditions,there are two main problems in this study:(1)Because of the limited vocabulary of junior high school students,and the training of the semantic association strategy only lasting two month,it is impossible to confirm whether the semantic association strategy can finally be internalized into the action consciousness of the subjects.(2)Because of the less research data,this research is still an exploratory study,and it needs to be further improved and perfected in the future,so that the semantic association strategy can help the students’ vocabulary learning in a better way.