Vocabulary instruction is one aspect of language teaching that has not been given the attention it deserves until recent years. For a long period of time, vocabulary is simply taught by asking students to study and memorize its meaning and spelling, its part of speech and its general function in a sentence. Thus, a student with a command of about three thousand English vocabulary items still finds it hard to adapt himself or herself to the requirement of demanding reading courses , which is more demanding due to its wide range of materials and large amount of vocabulary. As far as vocabulary instruction is concerned, the current research is mainly called point approach. It works well in rapid recitation, but it is not perfect. It is lacking in contextual environment, which leads to misunderstanding of the discourse, making it ineffective in speaking, reading and writing. The famous linguist Wilkins ( 1972 ) has confirmed in Linguistics and Language Teaching that, "We can not admit the view that grammar is more important than vocabulary. In fact, we can transmit limited information without grammar. However, we can transmit nothing without vocabulary."Linguist M.McCarthy ( 1990 ) claims that no matter how good one's grammar is and how beautiful one's pronunciation is, if one has no adequate vocabulary to express one's own feelings or to understand others'opinions, one still cannot communicate with others."And Harmer( 1990 ) also pointed out that "if language structures make up the skeleton of language, then it is vocabulary that provides the vital organs and flesh ." Yet without a deeper understanding of how vocabulary is taught in the classroom and which methods of teaching are more effective for learners, vocabulary instruction may not achieve the desired effects. By researching the topic on vocabulary learning and instruction, this essay intends to bring the attention of both teachers and learners to the weakness of the traditional approaches of teaching vocabulary and some different strategies in vocabulary instruction with the aim of improving the students'reading comprehension. A lot of students feel worried when speaking of unfamiliar words although they have learned English for six years at least. When they come across an unfamiliar word, they always stop reading, open their dictionaries to look up the word, write down the meaning, then go on reading. Maybe they think it is an efficient way to learn new words, but too much attention to vocabulary will do harm to the reader's reading habits, because every time they break off their reading to consult a dictionary, they not only slow down their reading speed, but even more seriously they interrupt their own thought process, which should be engaged in following the continued development of thought in the text, and at the same time it will have an effect on the grasp of the general meaning of the passage. In fact, they often meet stranger words when they read in their mother tongue, but they do not stop reading, usually continue reading successfully without using a dictionary. What should we do when encountering unfamiliar words in a passage? In this essay,several techniques can be used to determine the message of the author. And context clues are suggested to see if the surrounding words and grammatical structures can provide any information about the new words, word analysis can be used to see if understanding the part or parts of the new word can help to get an understanding of the whole word; making full use of the situation where the new words occur and using the contextual clues to judge the meanings of unknownwords is an effective way to understand the words. That is called word attack strategies. i.e. Guessing the meaning of unknown words from a written context in the English reading process. Finally readers can use the dictionary sensibly to determine the exact meanings of the new words. The theoretical base is cognitive strategy. In order to testify the feasibility and effectiveness, an experiment was conducted among 50 students. The experiment tends to investigate, from cognitive and crosslinguistic perspective, the word attack strategies in order to confirm in which way students can better comprehend the exact meanings. The research proved guessing meanings of unknown words in context is more effective, practicable and its application is meaningful. It is believed that the word attack strategies can help language learners to make greater progress in vocabulary learning. Perhaps this method may not be perfect in every aspect in vocabulary learning, it needs further researching.
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