A Study On English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School From The Perspective Of Semantic Field Theory

Semantic field,as a pivotal concept in semantics,focuses on semantic clustering.Words with a common or similar meaning can form a semantic field.Traditional semantics believes that the meaning of words is isolated and fragmented,like a mass of scattered sand.However,the semantic field theory breaks this cognition and suggests that the meanings of words exist systematically.It also emphasizes that the lexical meanings are interrelated and will be restricted by other words in the semantic field.Therefore,to determine the true meaning of a word,it is necessary to analyze and compare the sense relations between words which occur in the same lexical field.As stated by the English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition),English vocabulary teaching in junior high school should make rational use of semantic relations between words so as to improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching.Exploring an efficient and scientific vocabulary teaching method has become the focus of English teachers.Based on the theory of semantic field,this study was carried out in a public junior high school in Shanghai,which lasted for about three months.Testing,questionnaire and interview are used as the main research methods and the research subjects are students from Class 3,Grade 7.The study attempts to explore the following three questions.(1)How effective is vocabulary teaching based on semantic field theory in improving junior high students’ English vocabulary performance?(2)What is the effect of vocabulary teaching based on semantic field theory on students’ vocabulary learning strategies?(3)How to implement vocabulary teaching based on semantic field theory in junior high school?The results show that:(1)students’ performance has improved significantly in the post-test after the teaching experiment.The mean score of the post-test is4.5 points higher than that of the pre-test.It shows that this new vocabulary teaching method is helpful for most students to learn and accumulate vocabulary;(2)in terms of vocabulary learning strategies,students prefer to use more cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies to improve their vocabulary learning efficiency while social/affective strategies are less frequently used;(3)in this experiment,there are three stages to apply semantic field theory to junior high school English vocabulary instruction,which are brainstorming of the words in the same semantic field,constructing semantic fields and consolidation and production.Among them,the second stage is particularly critical.Teachers need to set up different sense relations to carry out vocabulary teaching and guide students to understand and remember words in the corresponding semantic field.