To Improve High School Students' Lexical Competence

Vocabulary learning sustains the whole process of language learning. And for the students who are learning English as a foreign language, vocabulary learning is the basis for the development of all language skills, such as pronunciation, grammar, discourse comprehension and translation. In the past two decades, researchers and educators have conducted researches into the relationship between the vocabulary size of the English learners and their language proficiency and found that vocabulary quantity alone can't reflect the overall language ability of the learners. Thus, the concept of lexical competence was introduced to illustrate the EFL learners'language proficiency. Along with the promoting of the new round of curriculum reform in China, the task-based language teaching model is being advocated strongly, which requires that the high school teachers pay more attention to the process of vocabulary acquisition while teaching English in the classroom. That is, the lexical competence of English learners should be highly concerned during the attempts of improving their language proficiency. The focus of the present study is to explore efficient ways to improve high school students'English lexical ability. The study, guided by the task-based teaching model, was designed to find out high school students'strengths and weaknesses in the dimensions of English lexical competence. And the writer has unveiled ways of how to conduct the task-based language teaching model in teaching English vocabulary. To test the efficiency of the TBLL, a long-term teaching experiment was carried in the study, which focused on the following questions:1. What is the current state of high school students'lexical competence and English vocabulary teaching in senior high school?2. Compared with the traditional vocabulary teaching method, can the task-based vocabulary teaching method efficiently improve the learners'vocabulary ability?3. What specific tasks or activities should the teachers design in their class to develop the high school students'English lexical competence?4. Will the task-based English vocabulary teaching method improve the learners' reading ability?In this study, the writer also discussed the correlation between lexical quantity and reading comprehension as well as the correlation between lexical quality and reading comprehension as well. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are combined in the research.During the experiment, the writer has designed various tasks and activities to stimulate the students' English vocabulary learning interest, helping them build up a high-leveled lexical competence. The result of the study shows that task-based teaching model can effectively guide the English vocabulary teaching. In addition, the writer also finds that, compared with the breadth of vocabulary knowledge, the more depth of vocabulary knowledge the high school learners acquired, the better their language proficiency.Finally, the writer summarizes task-based language teaching methods in teaching English vocabulary, talks about some issues in the process of conducing the methods, and points out the inadequacies of the study.