An Empirical Study On Teaching Vocabulary Though Interactive Activities In The Vocational School

There are no people who doubt about the importance of vocabulary in English learning. However, our attention paid to researches on vocabulary teaching is far from enough. Taking interaction hypothesis and motivation as its theory basis, this thesis aims at working out whether the interactive vocabulary teaching method is more effective than the traditional vocabulary teaching method in helping students learn new words and improving their overall English level as well.In order to make this point clear, the author raised three questions as follows:1)Whether interactive vocabulary teaching method can arouse vocational school students’ interest of vocabulary-learning;2)Whether interactive vocabulary teaching method is more effective than the traditional method in vocabulary-learning;3)Whether interactive vocabulary teaching method which embrace the instruction of a word’s pronunciation, multiple meaning, spelling, and normal collocation, can improve students’integrative English competence;4) What kind of interactive activities are prefered by students.The subjects were two classes of73freshmen from a vocational school in Changsha. The class with38students was the experimental class and the other class with35students was the control class. The experiment procedure is as follows:in the fisrt step, every subject was asked to complete a questionnaire of vocabulary-learning and a pre-test paper as well. Then, an8-week long experiment was carried out. A mid-test was given at the end of the fourth week. A posttest was given to both classes after the experiment. Subjects of experimental class were required to complete the second questionnaire. All the data collected from this experiment were analyzed by SPSS.By using two questionnaires and three tests and an8-week long experiment, the research had abtained the following results:1)The number of students in EC who appreciate interactive vocabulary teaching method increased greatly at the end of the8weeks’experiment.2)At the end of the experiment, the number of the students who believe interest of learning is an important factor in English learning in EC has obviously increased than that before the experiment.3) From the post test results after the experiment we can conclude that the students of EC performed much better than the students in CC not only in the vocabulary knowledge but in integrative competence as well. According to the research results, the author puts forward some suggestion for English vocabulary teaching of vocational schools:to make students interested in vocabulary-learning and English-study, teachers should make great efforts to update their teaching technics in accordance with the students’mental characteristics and finally achieve the goal of improving their integrative competences in English learning.Though there are some limitations in the present study, it provides some empirical statistic support for theoretical researches on the relationships among interest and motivation of English vocabulary learning and the English level. Thus it provides a new perspective for researches on English vocabulary teaching.