A Study On The Theory Of Teaching Vocabulary By Lexical Groups In TCSL

There are 8822 words, phrases and fixed language units which foreigners should pay special attention to learn while they learn Chinese. The number of these words is huge. Academe has studied a lot on how to rapidly extend over-sea students'vocabulary and improve their ability to use words. But until today, the study on the theory of vocabulary learning is much worse than the theory of pronunciation or grammar learning. Students tend to remember words without any skill or just learn them while meet them in text lacking for efficient vocabulary learning method.A common fault we must pay attention to in Teaching of Chinese as a second language is that the semantic relationship among words is neglected .The neglect of the relationship among words definitely will give some bad impact to vocabulary study in second language learning. The attitude about word meaning in language system of the theory of semantic field and the study fruits of psychologists and linguists on human's remembering vocabulary show that every word does not exist singly and randomly in our mind but group into many categories in the form of lexical group. The semantic relationship among words makes a network of association of ideas and if one word can be remembered other words will be awoke and brought into our mind. This enlightened us to take the advantage of semantic relationship among words to help student memory words efficiently, systematize and use learned words better.We are the first people brought forward the concept"lexical group"in the circle of teaching of Chinese as a second language. We think that through the relationship of vocabulary, words can be learned by groups and this will make word study systematic and much more efficient. Teaching words by groups have many new features in its theoretical foundation, the way to operate it and the nature it has so it is a new way deserve to try in vocabulary teaching. The function of lexical groups is that it can put words in all kinds of semantic networks and build up many fields of mental association, which will impress learner more deeply so as to quicken the learning speed, lessen learning difficulties and expend vocabulary. By this way, a bridge is made between lexical organization and word learning.To develop lexical group teaching we tried making the vocabulary forms for verbs and adjectives in primary level of teaching of Chinese as a second language. The forms contain all the verbs and adjectives in <>book I and II (Yang Jizhou, BeiJing language and culture university press,1999)and all the level Jia(甲)and level Yi(乙)verbs and adjectives in <>. The verbs can be classified into six sorts by its semantic relationships which are character, action, mental activity, general activity, phenomena and state, conjunction. These are first level sorts, which can be classified into smaller sorts. The adjectives can be classified into eight big sorts which are physiology, psychological state, moral and talent, plight, feeling, environment, character, relationship. Every big sorts can be classified into some smaller sorts.Because our time to research is limited we only made a lexical form for primary level verbs and adjectives, which is only an experimental attempt. In real class teaching we can break the limitation of parts of speech and make lexical groups flexibly by many other ways. The theory of teaching vocabulary by lexical groups not only must follow the common teaching principles but also should pay attention to sum up special principles of its own. The curriculum design of our teaching method must follow the special rules of teaching by lexical groups.