A Study Of Semantic Mapping Strategy Used In Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

In China, from primary school to college, English vocabulary teaching is not given enough attention in the classroom. It is believed that many students do poorly in English learning or even give up learning English, just because they are reluctant to remember words at the beginning. Gradually they lose interests in learning English, which leads to the failure of their English learning. Junior high school students have much difficulty in vocabulary learning and they spend much time in learning but the result does not deserve the efforts. It is because their vocabulary input is very limited, the students use the strategies in vocabulary learning have little effect, and some of them even don't know or use any strategies at all.The aim of this study is to examine if semantic mapping strategy instruction can be applied to junior high students and whether it can be used to reinforce the learners' vocabulary competence. Semantic mapping as a vocabulary strategy has long been studied and emphasized in language learning. It generally refers to brainstorming associations that a word has and then diagramming the results. A lot of foreign researchers, such as Adams (1990), Bos and Anders (1990) and many others have done empirical experiments on semantic mapping strategy instruction and they proved that the instruction worked well in vocabulary learning. But foreign researchers do most of the researches. This paper reports the author's study to examine if semantic mapping strategy instruction can be applied to junior high students in China.This thesis consists of six chapters. The research subjects are 81 students in Grade Two from a junior high school in Chang Ping district in Beijing. And the study lasted for about four months. Students were given clear instruction in the two classes and they were given tasks related to the application of semantic mapping strategy, which required students in class 3 to construct maps of new words and expressions, students in class 4 to construct maps of learned words and phrases. Both before and after the experiment there were vocabulary level tests for all the subjects.From the results of the study, we can draw a conclusion that semantic mapping strategy instruction does have a positive effect in vocabulary learning of junior high students in China. Junior high students can successfully learn vocabulary with the help of semantic mapping strategy. The data analysis of the pre-test and the post-test has also proved that using semantic mapping strategy in reviewing words are more effective than in learning new words. The result proves that semantic mapping strategy instruction can be introduced in vocabulary teaching and learning. And the author hopes that the findings of this research can benefit other teachers in the same endeavor.