Enlarge Productive Vocabulary To Improve Oral English Of Junior Middle School Students

Being the most popular foreign language, English plays an important role in schooling in China. Yet so much emphasis has been put on the scores of English written examinations that the long time ignorance of the importance of oral communication through English results in the poor oral English of learners in China. And failing to pick up words during communications in English seems to be a common problem of English learners in China, though learners themselves consider vocabulary an important part in English study and spend much time in memorizing words. This paper starts from research on the cause of this kind of lack of words while communicating in English and reveals the unbalanced development of receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary.In consideration of the above, the paper tries to prove that productive vocabulary teaching and learning should be strengthened in class and proper methods should be adopted to promote the transform of receptive vocabulary into productive vocabulary. A series of methods come out after the literature reviews on vocabulary from views of psycholinguists, sociolinguists, semanticists, etc. Then one experiment has been carried out among 40 junior middle school students, with another 42 students as control group. The experiment lasted one semester with careful design to apply the methods to improve productive vocabulary. After analyzing the scores of students' productive vocabulary tests and oral English tests before and after the experiment, the paper comes to the conclusion that enlarging productive vocabulary can efficiently improve the oral English performance of the English learners.