The Application Of The Context Theories To The Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of foreign language teaching. Its efficiency has close relation with the learners' communicative competence. Nevertheless, in China, vocabulary teaching is time-consuming but poorly-efficient. More and more English teachers realized that although students may remember a great number of words and idioms, they cannot use them appropriately, which usually result in pragmatic failure in communication. With the development of English reform, teachers and scholars have turned their attention to the research of vocabulary instruction. This thesis is an exploration of vocabulary teaching from theoretical and practical perspectives. It aims to explore a more effective and practical method of teaching vocabulary in context. The purpose is to arouse the students' interest, get a deeper comprehension of the word meaning, help them make good use of the relative context in order to grasp the connotative meaning of word completely and accurately and improve their communicative competence. The thesis is intended to find answers to the following questions:(1)What are word meaning and context and the relationship between them?(2)How can word meaning and context be classified?(3)How are context theories being employed in vocabulary teaching nowadays in China?Context was first proposed by the anthropologist Malinowski. It is a kind of linguistic phenomenon or phenomenon related to the use of language. Context can be simply described as the situations or circumstances of language use. It plays an important part in language study, especially for language application. Historically, many linguists, such as Malinowski, Firth,Halliday, Hymes, Ma Jianzhong, Chen Wangdao,Zhang Zhigong, He Zhaoxiong, Hu Zhuangling and Pei Wen, have elaborated context from the different perspectives. Based on the established context theory, the thesis gives careful explanations about the context including its definition, classification and the function in word meaning. The thesis makes a reclassification from a new perspective, divides the context into linguistic context (including lexical context, grammatical context and verbal context) which determines the internal relations of language and non-linguistic context(including situational context and cultural context) which determines the external relations of language. On the basis of the teaching practice, the focus of the thesis is on the tentative study of the application of context in vocabulary teaching. Context plays an important role in determining meaning.A word can not have a definite meaning without the help of a context. Lexical context can help students understand that the meaning of a word may vary in different collocations. With the help of grammatical context, students can understand the meaning of a word is...