A Study Of Effective Strategies Of Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle School

Vocabulary teaching has now being paid much attention to after a long period of being neglected. It is accepted as a fundamental component of second language proficiency. [31]As the famous linguist Wikins(1972) dated in Linguistics and Language Teaching that ,"we can not admit the view that grammar is more important than vocabulary .In fact, information without grammar. However, we can transmit nothing without vocabulary.". .Many researchers and teachers are focusing on it and contributing great efforts on it and have done great contribution in the area. As Meara initially noted in 1987 ,(and which has since become something of a cliché) , the field of vocabulary studies is now anything but a neglected area , and the mushrooming amount of experimental studies and pedagogical and reference material being published is enough to swamp even lexical specialists trying to keep abreast of current trends. Included in this recent flood have been a number of books focusing on various aspects of lexis, for example: The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition (McKeown and Curtis, 1987; L1 acquisition) , words in the Mind (Aitchison, 1987; the mental lexicon), Teaching and Learning Vocabulary (Nation, 1990; pedagogy), the Bilingual Lexicon ( Schreuder and Weltens, 1993; psycholinguistic aspects ), Second Language Reading and Vocabulary Learning (Huckin et al., 1993; guessing from context), and Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition (Coady and Huckin,1997; research studies).Reasons for the present emphasis on the techniques for teaching vocabulary i.e. nothing can be expressed without vocabulary. So to speak any language means to learn words at the very beginning . without vocabulary , nothing can be expressed.Next, for the students who have to attend the variety of exams: .Firstly, preparation for Variety of exams( NMET, TOEFL) which require mastering a certain amount of words. for example :with the reference of Syllabus for TEM four and Eight , English majors are required to master 5,000~6,000 words for TEM Four and 9,000~12,000 words for TEM Eight .For Senior Middle School students ,they have to learn 3,000~5,000 words for NMET.Vocabulary learning has become an obstacle for the learners for its much time–consuming and low efficiency. Many learners complain that they can not master so many words , and often forget the newly words very quickly or can not use them correctly and freely. In this essay, the ten effective vocabulary teaching and learning strategies are offered according to some valuable studies and researches at home and abroad and mine own teaching experience : word formation, contextual guessing, learned English explanation , extensive reading , key-word method ,making up a passage using the newly earned words, communicative strategies, consulting a dictionary, brain storming , collocations. In each part, relevant exercises are offered to demonstrate clearly. In order to ensure the credibility, all the materials are chosen from textbooks, NEMT papers, Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary, the Oxford Student's Dictionary of American English, and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary.Lastly, a experiment was held to test the effectiveness of the vocabulary teaching strategies. It is concluded that the vocabulary teaching strategies are beneficial and helpful, but they are not far enough for the learners. It still needs further researching.