Experimental Study Of Context-based Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle School

Vocabulary is one of the three components of language, which is the basis of language skill development. Meanwhile, vocabulary teaching plays an important part in senior high school's language teaching program. However, in traditional vocabulary teaching approach, the students'vocabulary learning attitudes, vocabulary memory strategies, word-guessing strategies and the results of vocabulary learning are not so good as imagined. Through mechanical learning, many high school students cannot understand proper meaning of the learned vocabulary or properly and flexibly use them. Many of them don't know how to deal with the new words in reading, whose vocabulary learning effect is not good. On one hand, it results from students'lack of context consciousness and isolating the meaning from the context. On the other hand, the teachers'lack of effective vocabulary teaching methodologies leads to this circumstance. Thus, it appears to be much more significant and urgent to explore a practical, scientific and effective vocabulary teaching approach to improve vocabulary teaching in senior high school.This paper is intended to explore how to make the most of context theory to improve vocabulary teaching in high school and the exploration is to be based on the author's investigation into the application of context in high school vocabulary teaching and learning, students'use of context strategies and causes of the problems.This thesis first reviews the literature on context and vocabulary teaching, including definition and type of context, vocabulary teaching strategies and the functions of context in the vocabulary teaching.In the empirical research, an experimental class and control class are to be chosen as samples. The ten-week empirical research is to test the feasibility and validity of the application of context-based vocabulary teaching approach in senior middle school. The following two hypotheses are examined: 1.Whether context-based approach of vocabulary teaching can activate students'interest in vocabulary learning and improve students'learning strategy on vocabulary? 2. Whether teaching vocabulary in context can enlighten the students to improve their competence of vocabulary application.During the research, the students were given two questionnaires and two vocabulary tests. The results analyzed by SPSS 19.0 indicate that the competence of vocabulary application in the experimental class in which context-based vocabulary teaching approach is applied is far better than that in the control class in which traditional teaching method is applied. Therefore, we can get the conclusion that context-based vocabulary teaching approach can motivate the students'interest in vocabulary learning and be helpful to improve the students'competence of vocabulary application., which is beneficial to cultivate the students'context awareness and context strategy.