How To Motivate Students To Learn English Vocabulary

Recently, most of the students in vocational middle schools seem defeated by learning English vocabulary. Facing this worrying situation, how to arouse, direct, and maintain students' behavior in learning English words becomes an urgent task to be dealt with. In the research, the author raises the question "Do activities and games help to motivate my students to learn English vocabulary?" The answer is "Yes. Activities and games used in vocabulary teaching can help to motivate the students to learnEnglish vocabulary".According to the theory of motivation, intrinsic motivation plays a key role inurging students to continue doing something. Extrinsic motivation is considered a more superficial and shapeable motivation. It involves external incentives. Thus the author attempts to promote students' intrinsic motivation and, at the same time, stimulates students extrinsically with the help of proper incentives. Then as an incentive that students like, games and activities are certainly the best measures to motivate students to learn vocabulary.In the thesis, on the basis of results of students' motivation questionnaires collected from sixty students in Grade One in a vocational middle school, the author chooses responding games and activities for the school-year vocabulary teaching experiment. By analyzing the data of the experiment, the author proves that games and activities used in vocabulary teaching are helpful to create students' motivation to learn English vocabulary.