A Study Of The Contextualization Of English Vocabulary Acquisition In Rural Senior High Schools

Since the 1970s, second language vocabulary acquisition has become an increasingly interesting topic of discussion for researchers. As Lewis (1993) argues, vocabulary acquisition is central to second language acquisition and is of critical importance to the enhancement of learners'language proficiency. For the students in China, the result of learning vocabulary is far from satisfactory although they have invested much time and energy in it. How to help them find out an optimized vocabulary learning method is an issue that needs to be solved urgently.The concept of context, first put forward by an anthropologist Malinowski in 1923, includes both linguistic context and extra-linguistic context. Acquiring vocabulary in context is directly conducive to the comprehension of vocabulary collocation and specific usage, the development of lexical application competence as well as the improvement of vocabulary long-term memorization. However, there are few systematic researches concerning how to apply context to English vocabulary teaching and learning. Most scholars abroad focus on the study of inferring word-meaning from context and overemphasize acquiring vocabulary incidentally from listening and reading. In China, some scholars have made an attempt to apply each type of context to English vocabulary teaching, but few of them take learners in rural senior high schools as the subjects.Accordingly, this thesis is devoted to the study of contextualization of English vocabulary acquisition in rural senior high schools in our country. To investigate the current situation of applying context theory to English vocabulary teaching and learning, the author conducts a survey by means of questionnaires and interviews in three rural senior high schools selected. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data, it is found that due to insufficient contextual knowledge, both teachers and learners fail to apply context theory to English vocabulary teaching and learning systematically although they have been aware of the important role of context in vocabulary acquisition. To solve this problem, the author, according to the special learning environment in rural areas, aims to explore some practical principles and contextualization-oriented English vocabulary teaching and learning strategies with the hope that they might be of some value and help. Only if English vocabulary is presented, consolidated and recited all through context, can vocabulary acquisition occur efficiently.