A Study On The Effects Of Markedness Theory On English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is the most essential component of a language, as Wilkins (1972) put forward it: without grammar very little can be expressed, without vocabulary nothing can be expressed. Therefore the teaching of vocabulary is a necessary and an essential part in second language instruction. Markedness Theory was advanced in the 1930s by the Prague School and was firstly used in phonology and later extended to many other domains in linguistics. Chinese scholars'researches on markedness theory started at the end of 1980s, because of its tremendous explanatory power, the scholars have been using it in the researches of Chinese grammar problems and testing the hypothesis concerning with markedness from language facts. The researches on markedness theory's effects in language acquisition has also restricted to the theoretical aspect, thus its significances in English teaching, especially in the fields of vocabulary teaching have not been valued, and the relative empirical studies are rare.In order to find whether the degree of markedness in English vocabulary has influence on students'acquisition results and test whether the four teaching methods proposed in this thesis can be effective in overcoming the vocabulary acquisition difficulty caused by markedness in English itself and the difference between Chinese and English, the researcher made a study about the"correlation between vocabulary markedness and acquisition difficulty"among senior high school freshmen who were enrolled in Juancheng No.1 Middle School in Shandong Heze in 2010. The author of this thesis preferred survey and experiment as the methods of data collection, carrying out a three months English vocabulary teaching to the experimental class and the control class by adopting two different teaching approaches, and lastly reached a conclusion by the analysis of the data.The overall data analysis shows that the different levels of markedness in English vocabulary itself and the distinction between the two languages'vocabularies are important reasons in causing students'acquisition difficulty; if the teacher can adjust and select the suitable English vocabulary teaching orders and methods according to the markedness of vocabulary, the students'vocabulary acquisition difficulty can be effectively reduced.