| Any language is composed of phonetics, grammar and vocabulary. Phonetics may be regarded as people's appearance, and grammar can be compared to people's skeleton and vocabulary is just like people's flesh and blood. Hence it can be seen clearly that without vocabulary no language is imaginable. In terms of the status of vocabulary in foreign language teaching, there were a lot of debates throughout the history of teaching methodology. No matter how different people's opinions are, currently they have to acknowledge the fact that the formation of any language skill is based on certain language materials. In addition to that, one important aspect of the accumulation of the language materials is to have a good command of the vocabulary of the language. However, it seems that students have the greatest difficulty in learning foreign words. Sometimes students feel that it is hard to commit foreign words to memory or that they are likely to make many mistakes when they try to use the words they have learned. There may exist many causes, which may belong to either intralingual or interlingual category. As far as vocabulary teaching is concerned, maybe it is because teachers and students do not attach much attention to the explanation of the structures of foreign words, the conveyance of meanings and the characteristics of the acquisition of foreign words, etc. that the methods of teaching andlearning fail to be effective. Therefore, it is quite critical for foreign language teachers to seek and master the proper techniques of vocabulary teaching. In my paper, I will firstly briefly review the history and development of vocabulary teaching, touching upon linguists and teachers' various teaching approaches to vocabulary teaching. Then I will analyze the common vocabulary errors made by students. Next, I will talk about how to teach vocabulary in context. In the final section, I will carry out an experiment to prove the effectiveness of teaching English vocabulary in context. |
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