The Application Of Contextual Theories In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

Vocabulary is the most important one of the three major components that constitute English language and it is the foundation of any kind of communication. No matter how good one's grammar is, if he doesn't have enough vocabulary to express his own feelings or to understand others' opinions, he can still not communicate with others in this language. However, vocabulary learning is the most difficult task in the study of foreign language. It is, therefore, especially important to study vocabulary learning strategies and its teaching methods.Teaching vocabulary in senior middle schools is not an easy job due to its complexity and speciality. Vocabulary teaching poses a big problem to English teachers. In order to improve vocabulary teaching, a questionnaire is done to get some general information about students' vocabulary learning. From the results of the questionnaire, the author finds that the students employ a narrow range of vocabulary leaning strategies. In other words, they lack proper and effective learning strategies. They lack the guidance of advanced theory.Under the framework of the traditional teaching methods, many students, especially students in senior middle school stills could not understand and use English words appropriately after learning English for many years. The main reason is that the students only remember the connotative word meanings, which are usually mentioned on the textbooks or in the dictionary. However, the same English words may have different meanings in different contexts, for the same word may bear different associative meanings. Therefore, contexts play an important role in interpreting and restricting the meaning of words and the teaching and learning of English vocabulary cannot be detached from contexts.The purpose in this thesis is to construct a framework for using the context theory to improve students' vocabulary learning. In order to make theory and practice linked, an experimental study is carried out to test how the students' context awareness affect their use of vocabulary. Finally, the result shows that the average score and passing rate of the experimental group in which vocabularies are taught through systematic context-based approach is much higher than those of the control group in which vocabularies are taught mainly through word lists. There is a significant improvement of students' performance in the experimental group. The result of the post-test has also shown that the students in the experimental group benefit from effective context-based approach. The author, therefore, discovers that learning vocabulary in context is more helpful to senior middle school learners in improving their vocabulary application. Moreover, it can improve the students' interest in vocabulary learning and has a positive effect on developing their vocabulary learning strategy.