A Study On Lexical Cohesion In Vocabulary Teaching And Learning Of Senior High Students

Vocabulary teaching is a weak part in senior high schools in China for a long time. Many senior high students often complain that vocabulary is the biggest obstacle during English learning, and insufficient amount of vocabulary is an important reason for failing in their examinations.In China, newly issued Senior High School English Curriculum Standards (Trial Edition) also clearly argues that vocabulary teaching is one of the important parts in English instruction and the requirements to the vocabulary of senior students are much higher. However, in vocabulary learning and using, students usually meet various difficulties.In order to investigate the problems students are facing in vocabulary learning and the ways teachers adopt in their vocabulary teaching, the thesis employs two questionnaires and tries to introduce a new way. The subjects are 120 grade-one senior high students and 18 senior English teachers of Kangjie middle school in Yuncheng, Shanxi province. The results show that most of senior students have small size of vocabulary and often ignore the depth of vocabulary; meanwhile, their teachers'methods of teaching vocabulary are too traditional and out-dated, and they lack instructions to students'vocabulary learning.Under such circumstance, lexical cohesion is suggested adopting into English vocabulary learning in senior high school. Through qualitative and quantitative research, the thesis employs pre-test, post-test and questionnaires, aiming to solve the problems both students and teachers are facing. The study adopts experimental class and control class. After training about lexical cohesion to experimental class for 6 months, the results of experimental class are much higher than that of control class. In conclusion, lexical cohesion method made a big improvement in vocabulary teaching and learning of senior high school.