A Study Of The Effect Of Pre-Teaching Vocabulary Intensively On The Improvement Of Students' Reading Competence In English

Both for students and teachers in senior middle schools, reading holds an important position in their English learning and teaching. And this position is further enhanced by the newly issued Senior High School English Curriculum Criterion. Since reading comprehension is a complex process and many factors contribute to proper reading comprehension, it has been a challenge for teachers to build an effective scaffold to help students improve their reading competence. However, many studies have demonstrated that of all the factors reading comprehension is most strongly related to vocabulary knowledge, especially with beginners, whose vocabulary size is not beyond the threshold vocabulary or sight vocabulary. Compared with implicit vocabulary instruction, direct vocabulary instruction plays a relatively greater role in the vocabulary growth of L2 learners. Pre-teaching vocabulary intensively, as a good example of direct vocabulary instruction, advocated by Ma Cheng, has been carried out in many elementary and junior middle schools and proved to be a relatively successful way to help students to learn a large number of words in a short period of time. The aim of the present study is to find out whether the method can assist students of the senior middle school in improving their vocabulary knowledge and consequently in what way it will affect their reading comprehension. The study attempts to answer the following research questions:1. Does (and to what degree) pre-teaching vocabulary intensively facilitatereading comprehension?...