A Survey On Vocabulary Teaching Strategies In Senior High Schools

At present, senior high school students are required to master a larger and larger vocabulary. Teachers of English are faced with the challenge of how to help students store and retrieve words in the target language in a more effective way. But because of too large a vocabulary, students have much difficulty in dealing with the text books. The aim of the thesis is to help teachers of English find out the reasons why students fail to acquire vocabulary, especially on the terms of teaching strategies. Based on Nation's theory of "knowing a word" (i.e. receptive knowledge and productive knowledge), and Stern's vocabulary teaching strategies (i.e. intralingual-corsslingual strategies, the analytic-experiential strategies, and explicit-implicit strategies), this thesis mainly makes an attempt to have a rough description about present vocabulary teaching strategies at senior high schools and try to analyze the possible relationship between the problems in students' vocabulary acquisition and the teaching strategies in order to draw teachers' attention to vocabulary teaching strategies.The thesis employs quantitative study. The study was conducted through a writing test and a questionnaire. First, 38 senior 3 students from five different schools in Dagang District, Tianjin were given a writing test. Error analysis was carried out to classify and analyze the errors in the test. The result is that better group has a fundamental basis in contrast with the poor group. However, the common errors made by the two groups lie in word appropriateness and meaning, suggesting that the two groups both fail to reach the depth of a word.Then a questionnaire was carried out, which was designed to find out whether there...