An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Creating Context In Senior High School English Vocabulary Learning

As the carrier of a language vocabulary is an important component of language knowledge.Senior high school is the most important period for English vocabulary teaching,which bears the most important task of English teaching.The newly amended syllabus sets lower requirement to students' acquisition of grammar but requires more about students' stock of words.However the present vocabulary teaching method costs much time but has less effect.The author puts forward new vocabulary teaching method which improves learning efficiency by creating context based on former scholars' study results.The word context is proposed in 1920 s abroad.Late,scholars in China began to study the context theory.In1970 s context theory was widely used in vocabulary teaching.In this thesis the author wants to prove whether the context creating vocabulary teaching method can help students to master more vocabularies than the traditional teaching method.So the research questions are:1.Can context creating vocabulary teaching method help students toremember more vocabularies?2.Can this method improve students' ability of using vocabulary?This study is to put words and phrases of each unit into a context created by both teachers and students.There are three kinds of contexts created in this thesis including lexical context,grammatical context and situational context(lexical context is designed for those words that have phrase collocations,grammatical context is for those words with multiple meanings and situational context can cover other key words).Students will be able to apply the vocabulary to the real context and use them correctly in this way.The boring vocabulary review will be turned into a students-centered activity.Students make sentences with the target vocabulary then they make up a short passage with these sentences.Finally they can memory these words and phrases so that their ability of vocabulary application will be improved.About 102 senior high students Grade three from two classes in Xinghe No.1 middle school are chosen as the subject of this study.One class is the experimental class and the other is the control class.The control class remains to use the traditional method to teach students vocabulary during the first round of review in which students are asked to read the word list —the teacher explains key words—the teacher gives examples by making sentences—students are asked to memorize words—the teacher checks their work next class.The experimental class adopted the vocabulary teaching method of creating context and integrated key words to create Lexical context,grammar context and situational context.A variety of collocation words were placed in the lexical context,and the grammatical context mainly targets at multiple words.The rest of the key words are put in the context of situation,respectively,situational contexts are created according to the unit theme and experience and interests of the teacher and her students with the requirement of using this unit's target words as many as possible.For the situational context,students are divided into three groups.Each group picks up a given topic to write a paragraph with as many target words as possible.Finally,they are asked to show the paragraph on the blackboard.Other students will do error correction.There are two researching methods used in this study,including interviews and tests.A pretest and a post-test are adopted to test student's ability of memorizing and suing words.The soft ware SPSS is applied to analyze the data getting from the two tests.It is expected to get the conclusion that this method does help to students to remember more words as well as improve students' ability of using vocabulary.The research result can provide some useful suggestions for future vocabulary teaching.The author also hopes to help more teachers and students improve vocabulary teaching and learning efficiency.However,because the author's knowledge and experience are limited.There still exists some shortcomings in this study that has to be perfect.