Vocabulary Teaching Guided By Self-efficacy

It is generally acknowledged that it is of crucial significance for foreign language learners to master a specific amount of vocabulary of the target language, which is indicative of his or her proficiency. The demand for vocabulary is becoming higher and higher in Senior English teaching material and in the National Matriculation English Test, and students find that vocabulary is a great barrier in reading and examinations, regardless of great efforts in learning and memorizing words, so they have a strong feeling of failure.Based on Bandura's theory of self-efficacy, this paper combines some related researches in this field with the approaches to promoting students'perceived academic self-efficacy, and it analyzes the low efficiency in vocabulary learning and the two main causes of this problem:one is the one-sided mastery of some basic words, especially polysemous words and homonyms; and the other is oblivion caused by low repetition rate. Then it puts forward an assumption to overcome these two barriers in vocabulary by promoting perceived academic self-efficacy.After a careful study in the relationship between perceived academic self-efficacy and vocabulary teaching, the writer explores how to combine promoting students' perceived academic self-efficacy with vocabulary teaching. Based on the four sources of self-efficacy, the paper first deals with how to promote students'perceived academic self-efficacy in vocabulary teaching. It mainly talks about it from the five following aspects:let students experience success; set them good examples; help them attribute reasonably; encourage them efficiently and create a good studying atmosphere. Then it talks about how to combine these five methods together and use them flexibly in the practical teaching. Meanwhile, aimed at the two causes of low efficiency in vocabulary learning, the paper puts forward a mode of vocabulary teaching guided by the theory of self-efficacyFirstly, the more basic the words are, the more meanings they have. But usually the students only keep firmly in mind the most frequently used meaning or the first-learned meaning and fail to accept other meanings, which results in the strange phenomenon that they know the words but can't understand sentences. And it greatly weakens their interest and confidence in study. So it is necessary to systematize the teaching of basic words which have more meanings. Secondly, different teaching methods should be adopted and various activities should be designed to increase the repetition rate of vocabulary and help the students overcome the difficulty and get rid of the depression caused by oblivion.In order to demonstrate the effect of perceived academic self-efficacy on vocabulary teaching, an experimental research is done and a teaching experiment lasts four months. After the analysis of the results of the pre-test and post-test, a conclusion is drawn that applying the theory of self-efficacy to English vocabulary teaching can help improve the students English grades, and the effect is more obvious on the vocabulary dictation. Then teaching advice is put forward based on the results of the experiment and the writer's teaching practice。...