Promoting High School English Vocabulary Teaching Through The Word Wall: An Action Research Report

Vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to the language learners. But the author's students are not able to use proper strategies in vocabulary learning, and arrange their revision at the right time. They neither have enough training exercises. So they can't do well in vocabulary learning. In order to have an efficient vocabulary teaching and find solutions to solve the difficulties that my students have, I do an action research on promoting high school English vocabulary teaching through the Word Wall. The Word Wall approach is designed for language learners to develop vocabulary learning skills and to internalize new vocabulary. The teacher surrounds the students with a set of word wall panels, including lexical items selected from vocabulary lists corresponding to classroom readers and lists of high-frequency English words. The teacher can integrate them into various classroom lessons, accommodating individual, pairs, small group, and whole class instruction. Through this research, the author hope to find out whether the approach can solve the problems that I meet in vocabulary teaching and how we can combine this approach with teaching practice well and what should be paid attention to while we are applying it.At the beginning, I found out what difficulties the students have and what caused them through a questionnaire. During the course of the research, I learned what problems had occurred when we learned vocabulary through the Word Wall by communication with some students and tests. Then I took appropriate measures to use the Word Wall better. At last I collected data by means of tests, investigation and interviews to analyze the results of the research.The data show that the Word Wall approach can solve the problems that my students have in learning vocabulary. It can help the students to use learning strategies and form the habit of revising and improve the students' abilities of using English. It makes vocabulary teaching more efficient.When we teach vocabulary through the Word Wall, both the choice of attached words and the number of words on the Word Wall need our careful consideration. It also needs our further study how to balance the words on the wall and the words not on the wall.The Word Wall approach has been widely used abroad, while there is little research on it in China. The research is helpful to explore how to use the Word Wall approach in our classroom and make better use of it in English teaching.