An Application Of Lexical Cohesion Theory To Senior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

Experienced teachers of English as a second language know very well vocabulary teaching is the important component of English teaching. For many years, however, little attention was given to the techniques for helping students learn vocabulary. Fortunately, along with the teaching need and the deep going of theoretical study, vocabulary teaching regained great concern and became one of the major points in linguistic research and language teaching. However, although many new vocabulary teaching methods emerged one after another, learning efficiency of English learners was not improved greatly. Most students still have fallen into rote learning.In recent years, increased attention has been paid to teaching vocabulary in text which is regarded as the key to help the students study vocabulary efficiently. Hence text cohesion theory was developed and applied in vocabulary teaching bridged by lexical cohesion. Most of research conducted in recent years, however, was aimed at College English vocabulary teaching, and little at Senior Middle School English vocabulary teaching. The author, therefore, from the perspective of teaching practice, proposes the viewpoint of applying lexical cohesion theory into Senior Middle School English vocabulary teaching, namely, lexical cohesion teaching method.Starting from the importance of vocabulary teaching and the literature review, the thesis practically proves that lexical cohesion teaching method greatly contributes to vocabulary teaching as well as theoretically demonstrates that the feasibility of lexical cohesion teaching method into Senior Middle School English vocabulary teaching.The author focuses on a detailed illustration about how the lexical cohesion teaching method is used into Senior Middle School English vocabulary teaching. In order to testify that lexical cohesion teaching method can help Senior Middle School students improve their vocabulary learning ability and the entire English proficiency, a teaching experiment is carried out, in which the lexical cohesion method is adopted in the experimental class(EC) while the traditional vocabulary teaching in the control class(CC). For the data of the pretest and the postest in the experiment, an independent samples T-test is undertaken by means of SPSS. The independent samples T-test reveals no significant difference between the scores of the EC and the CC before the experiment; after the experiment, the independent samples T-test led a different result.The thesis fully proves that lexical cohesion teaching method into Senior Middle School English greatly improves vocabulary acquirement and the entire English proficiency, which is assumed to shed some light on Senior Middle School English vocabulary teaching. Meanwhile, it is supposed to offer some implications for the further research in the future. However, this thesis is just an attempt research of applying lexical cohesion theory into Senior Middle School English vocabulary teaching and is open to be discussed and improved.