On The Application Of Context Teaching Method To Vocabulary Learning Of Senior Middle School Students

Ever since 1970's, the study on lexical acquisition has gradually become one of the most popular fields in the second language acquisition. Researches abroad show that exploiting context is the main method of learning vocabulary. Scholars at home have made some studies on the relationship between context and vocabulary, which mainly focus on either the explanation of foreign theories or introducing their own experience without authentic proofs. Faced with the task to help the remedial students to master 1500 new words within one year, the author of the present paper decides to make an attempt by means of the Context Teaching Method so as to find out an effective way to learn English words in senior middle school.This essay first reviews theories on language environment and lexical test, then the author conducts an experiment of intensive reading and extensive reading, and test the students' vocabulary size and depth of acquisition. By comparing the first with the second test results, the author draws a conclusion about the effect of the Context Teaching Method.For the reading experiment materials, intensive reading is made up of the new textbooks of senior Ⅱ and Ⅲ, while extensive reading includes 170,000-word selective materials. At the beginning of their remedy, the prior test is given; at the end of the reading experiment, the latter given.To test the students' vocabulary size, the paper uses the Dictionary Method, that is, take separately 100 words at random from the old Examination Programme and the new Curriculum Standard, and the students are asked to choose the best meaning form the item A, B, C and D. In this way, their vocabulary size can by figured out using thisformat: vocabulary size=the number of correct choices × (the total vocabulary)/100(Nation,2004:76) . The students' average vocabulary size is 1810, including 118 words from the new Curriculum Standard; after the experiment, their average vocabulary size has risen to 2849,1034 of which is from the new Curriculum Standard. In this way. We can draw a conclusion that the Context Teaching Method is indeed efficient to enlarge the students' vocabulary.