A Study On English Vocabulary Teaching And Learning Strategies In Reading Class Of Senior High School

Language is the instrument of communication, which involves three elements: pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary is the foundation of all English language skills. More and more learners, teachers as well as researchers have come to the consensus that vocabulary is essential to foreign language learning and teaching, without which, none of the five skills of a language (listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating) will be made possible. Just as linguist M. McCarthy (1990:3) claims that no matter how good one's grammar is and how beautiful one's pronunciation is, but if one has no adequate vocabulary to express one's own feelings or to understand others' opinions, one still cannot communicate with others in this language.While many linguists (such as Aden 1983; Gairns 1986; Carter 1987; cf, Zimmerman 1997:121-140) hold the view that vocabulary teaching has not obtained enough or little emphasis it deserves in English class, the situations of English vocabulary teaching and learning in China are quite different. Both teachers and learners are attaching great importance to English vocabulary. The newly-issued "Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(Trial Edition)" 《普通高中英语课程标准 (实验稿)》 2003) has set a higher requirement for vocabulary. Unfortunately, both teachers and students spend enormous amounts of time and energy in vocabulary teaching and learning, but the reward is very little. Quite a lot of students feel it hard to meet the requirement for vocabulary set in the new "Curriculum Standards". Vocabularylearning has always been the most challenging and time consuming part for them. Students are in great need of guidance on how to learn vocabulary effectively and efficiently.Due to the above reasons, the thesis aims to investigate the current situations of vocabulary teaching and learning on the basis of the new "Curriculum Standards" in the local senior high school, analyze the existing problems and eventually put forward some pedagogic suggestions on vocabulary instruction.The thesis consists of the following seven chapters: Chapter One introduces the purpose and importance of the thesis. Chapter Two discusses the importance of vocabulary teaching and learning in English class, the situation of vocabulary teaching and learning in Chinese senior high schools and the necessity of vocabulary teaching and learning strategy research. Chapter Three reviews the brief history of language learning strategy and the relevant literature of vocabulary learning and teaching strategies that is closely associated with the research of the thesis. Chapter Four deals with vocabulary teaching and learning in reading class, including why explicit vocabulary instruction is important in senior high schools in China; what the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension is; what the threshold vocabulary for reading comprehension is; what it means to learn a word; how teachers go about teaching vocabulary and how learners go about learning vocabulary. Chapter Five introduces the present study by undertaking two questionnaires among 650senior high school students and an interview with 19 English teachers and provides the results and discussions of the data collected and processed in detail. Chapter Six includes an experiment on the effectiveness of vocabulary teaching and learning strategies in reading class. Chapter Seven draws the conclusions of the whole research. It summarizes the study and gives answers to the research questions and meanwhile it puts forward some pedagogical suggestions and points out the limitation and the questions for further research.