Application Of Categorization-based Instructional Design To Child English Vocabulary Teaching

For the past few years, with the developments of society, economy and culture, the China's society has attached more importance to child English education than ever before. In 2001, the Ministry of Edication (MOE) issued the Reform Outline of Compulsory Education Curriculum, which requires that English education begin in grade three and that primary school students have at least four periods of English education per week. MOE also defines the students'English competence with nine levels, which also requires that the students should grasp 600 to 700 words and about 50 phrases related to the topics at Level Two before they graduate from primary school. It also puts forward new requirements about child English vocabulary teaching and learning. So, how to teach English vocabulary effectively to children has become a very important and attracive question. Instructional design is the operational plan of what should be taught and how to teach. More and more researchers and teachers focus on the study and practice of vocabulary instructional design.Nowadays, there were many researchers who pay more attention on vocabulary instruction like Nation, Wei Liming, Fan Wei, etc. They repeated the impotance of vocabulary instruction and emphasise how to arrange the vocabulary instruction in the class and talked about the exploitation of the textbook in the instructional design. Based on the previous study, this thesis made a trial study of vocabulary instructional design. The ability to categorization plays an important role in our daily life just as Lakoff (1987) said,"Without the ability to categorize it, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives."In the same way, categorization is also a basic ability for us to learn and memorize vocabulaty. So, this study integrated categrization with the instructional design for children mainly aiming at improving children's English vocabulary instruction and helping them learn and memorize vocabulary effectively.In this study, there were 168 children of Jiuquan Kangsheng Primary School and Jia Zhai Ke Primary School of Jingyuan County in Gansu Province took part in the questionnaire investigation, whose ages range from 10 to 14 years old. And then, 78 children in two intact classes of Jiuquan Kangsheng Primary School were chosen randomly to be involved in the experiment. The author chose 100 hundred words and phrases from the objective vocabulary of Level Two in New Curriculum Criteria as teaching vocabulary in experiment. Next, the author applied the categorization-based vocabulary instructional designs to classes in order to test that the categorization-based vocabulary instructional design was significant and effective for children's English vocabulary instruction and memorization. The experiment lasted for about two and a half months. After that, the author arranged a posttest and a delayed test for the students. All the data were collected and analysed with sofeware SPSS 13.0.The study of questionnaires showed that children did apply categorization-based strategies when they learned and memorized English vocabulary, including. And the experiment of categorization-based instructional design also reflected that such kind of vocabulary instruction is significant and helpful for children. And through analysing the marks of children's vocabulary and achievements of their final examination, the author found that the children's vocabulary ability was correlated to their comprehensive competence of English.After this study, the author finds that there are many things could be done for the study on vocabulary instructional design of child English in the future. We should emphasize the vocabulary instruction of children, helping them be interested in English and be confident to learn English well. With regard to the memorizing strategies, the children should be trained to grasp and use some useful strategies during their learning and memorization. Of course, categorization should be treated as a basic strategy guiding their vocabulary instruction and memorization. And more efforts should be made by teachers and researchers to help children effectively grasp more vocabulary and make children to be successful beginning learners of English.