A Study Of The Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Schools

With the development of the science and technology, especially after our statecarrying out policy of opening the door to the outside world, and with the frequentexchanges of culture and economic activities with other countries, English, as alanguage spoken all over the world, becomes more and more important today. Years'English teaching experience makes us clearly realize that vocabulary is the base ofimproving the English teaching effect. If we say that English teaching is a tallbuilding, then the vocabulary should be the bricks;If the English teaching is a big tree,then the vocabulary should be the root. That is to say, if we want to improve theEnglish teaching effect, we must strengthen the vocabulary teaching first. But how toteach vocabulary effectively has been puzzling a great many English teachers insenior schools from beginning to end. For English vocabulary teaching is anextremely difficult task. If it is not taught properly, the students are apt to lose theenthusiasm with which they learned and recited words at the beginning and theteachers are liable to feel disappointed with the students because they make so slowprogress. For this reason, to choose a good and proper way of teaching vocabulary insenior schools has become an urgent and common aspiration of all the teachers andstudents.The thesis mainly studies the vocabulary teaching through context-basedapproach in senior schools. Context includes not only the co-text of the passage or theconversation, but also all kinds of situational contexts. Without a certain context,words will be meaningless, because of which context is important and necessary. Thatis to say, students should learn words in a certain context. As Lu Shuxiang, a famouslinguist, said:" Only in a certain context, can words be given life and easy toremember and used appropriately." Then students can make good use of the wordsand well understand their meanings by using context-based approach. The authormakes an experimental design, namely, makes a ten-month experiment to theexperimental class and the control class respectively, during which the author givesthree vocabulary tests and two context use tests. In the end, the result that is analyzedby SPSS 11.5 shows that the scores of the experimental class which are taughtvocabulary through effective and systematic context-based approach are much betterthan those of the control class which are taught vocabulary mainly through words list.The author, therefore, discovers that effective and systematic trainings can not onlymake students learn how to enlarge vocabulary by skillfully using context but alsoimprove teaching effect greatly.The first chapter introduces some main teaching methods in history such as thegrammar translation method, direct method, communicative method, all of whichhave their own advantages and disadvantages. We cannot say which is good or bad.We should choose a more effective and suitable approach to teach vocabulary in termsof the teaching subjects, aims and contents, etc.The second chapter introduces the theory involved in this study, that is, learn andteach vocabulary through a context-based approach. The author specificallyintroduces types of the context clues, types of knowledge that contribute to contextualinference, that is, linguistic knowledge, syntactic knowledge, word schemas,vocabulary knowledge, world knowledge and strategic knowledge.The third chapter is the experimental design of the thesis. The author choosestwo classes as the experimental class and control class. These two classes need torespectively take three vocabulary tests and two context use tests. In the experimentalclass, the author trains students systematically to gain vocabulary from context andthen does an empirical research on the result between vocabulary breadth and contextuse.The fourth chapter is the result analysis and discussion. The author uses SPSS11.5 to analyze the results of vocabulary tests and the results of the use of contexttests. At the same time, the author describes the main findings of the experiment indetail as well as the significance of the experiment.The fifth chapter gives some suggestions for class application of thecontext-based approach and how to train students to use contextual clues to learnvocabulary.At present, there are more researches on vocabulary incidental acquisition, whileless in China. So according to the characteristics of Chinese students in senior schools,this study will be of great help and importance to the teaching of English vocabularyin senior schools.