The Application Of Contextual Vocabulary Teaching In Professional College

As we have entered the 21st century, more and more attention has been paid to vocabulary acquisition in language education. This paper summarizes the relevant studies about context and vocabulary acquisition, asserting the method of contextual vocabulary teaching. The contextual vocabulary teaching here means involving students in guessing the meaning from the text, looking up those words from the dictionary to get the accurate identification and imitating the context where the words occur to make sentences. Based on the context theories and vocabulary theories, this method is supposed to be effective on stimulating the students'interests in learning vocabulary, improving efficiency of grasping word meaning as well as language proficiency.In order to test the validity of contextual vocabulary teaching, an Experiment was carried out between two classes which share the same major in a professional college. The contextual vocabulary teaching model was applied in the experiment class and the traditional method was applied in the control class. A pretest was taken before the experiment, which showed no difference between the two classes. After a four-month experiment, a comprehensive test was given to the two classes, which showed there were significant difference in vocabulary part and some difference in comprehensive part. Students in experiment class have done much better than the students in the control class either in vocabulary or in comprehensive language proficiency.The analysis of this research indicates that contextual vocabulary teaching can not only stimulate students'interest in English vocabulary learning but also facilitate the grasp of the word meaning, improve the retention of the vocabulary and enhance the comprehensive language proficiency.