A Study Of The Acquisition Of Productive Vocabulary In High Schools

It usually takes up a great amount of time to deal with vocabulary in English teaching and learning in senior high schools. Newly-issued curriculum contains 3,500 words which require the learners to be able to listen to, speak, read and write properly, correctly and exactly. Meanwhile, the requirements for the use of the words have been improving ever since. In many cases learners are supposed to be able to guess the meaning of certain more words according to the context and clues from paragraphs above and below. Thus, students are advised to master 1,000-1,500 additional (receptive) words for the purpose of living up to the new standard of reading instruction and tests accordingly. In order to achieve this, students have made great efforts to do a lot of memory work day by day and read extensively and intensively. However, seldom can we meet students who are most pleased with the results of their vocabulary task.The author of this thesis makes a study of the approach to teaching the 3,500 productive words and introducing the Lexical Approach to the vocabulary instruction in the classroom. Lexical approach to English teaching has been well received in recent years as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. It opens a door to which both the grammatical structure and the context are taken care of. It concentrates on developing learners'skills in understanding and using words and word combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks as unanalyzed wholes (Nattinger, 2000), or chunks, and by these chunks learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar. Lexical chunks exist everywhere in language and they affect the learners in the process of both intake and output, that is, in listening, reading, speaking and writing. In practice, writing is considered the most demanding method with which students'ability to use certain words can be seen clearly and easily. While writing, a student cannot avoid the spelling, collocation, part of speech and some other aspects of a word. During the scientific experiment to check the result and effect of the Lexical Approach on the vocabulary, the form of English writing is adopted to test how much and how well the learners learn the vocabulary. Through one year's experiment, reliable facts and statistics are collected to prove its good effect and high efficiency. This thesis consists of four chapters with introduction at the beginning and conclusion at the end. The introduction part points out the importance and urgency of vocabulary instruction in high schools and introduces the lexical approach as an effective solution. It further clarifies the cause of the study and writing as a basic form to check the result of the research. Two hypotheses based on the research are also provided. One is that the lexical approach helps students to master the required productive vocabulary. The other is that the lexical approach does improve students'English writing.Chapter One reviews the present and past situations in vocabulary instruction. Then it introduces the perspectives at lexis and lexical approach. Furthermore, it presents the definition and categories of Lexical Approach on the basis of the research on Lexical Approach instruction at home and abroad. The contributions made by Widdowson, Chambers, Pawley, Syder, Becker, Lewis and some others to Lexical Approach are also referred to in this chapter.Chapter Two introduces the linguistic theories related to this research. In this part, functions of the Lexical Approach and its influence on listening, speaking, reading and writing are all displayed. Two new terms, receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary, are brought in and their effects on writing are illustrated. This paves the way for the most critical part of this thesis, Chapter Three and Four.Chapter Three is the experimental design of this thesis and it also discusses the results of the experiment. It touches upon the subjects, materials, instrument and procedures used in the experiment. Furthermore, it explicates some instruction samples with the employed methods when teaching vocabulary and English writing during the experimental period.Chapter Four illustrates some pedagogical implications on the basis of the experiment by providing theoretical suggestions and practical activities performed in lessons and the limits existing in the study.The thesis ends with the conclusion of the research, the achievements made to prove the two hypotheses.