Effective English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle School In Line With The New Curriculum Criteria

English vocabulary is a foundation of English study and one of three major elements of language. The importance of vocabulary in English learning and teaching has already attracted both the domestic and international experts. Linguists at all times and in all countries have spared no effort to seek new approaches to foreign languages, their efforts brought about some teaching approaches:Grammar Translation Method; Audio-lingual Method; Situational Language Teaching and the Communicative Approaches. However, about English teaching in middle schools, the problem of the time-consuming and poor efficiency exists. Students complain that words are easy to forget. Teachers think the study of words is students’ own business and thus do not give enough attention to vocabulary teaching. This has a great effect on students’ language learning. Studying vocabulary can improve students’ learning efficiency, achieving double efforts with half the work.The new English Curriculum Criteria sets higher requirements for vocabulary teaching and learning. Based on this presupposition, how English teachers in senior middle school can effectively teach vocabulary becomes an important problem that teachers should put greater emphasis on. This thesis aims to solve the problems existing in vocabulary teaching and give answers to three questions:(1) How can students’ interest in vocabulary learning be aroused? (2) How can we enable students to expend their vocabulary? (3) How can we improve students’ ability of vocabulary use? And eventually improve our students’ language communicative ability to meet the new English Curriculum Criteria’s requirements.This thesis begins with an overview of the situation of English vocabulary teaching (EVTL) in senior middle school based on a questionnaire. Students’ poor vocabulary learning is ascribed to lack of knowledge of English lexicology; lack of cultural knowledge relevant to words and idioms; employment of impractical traditional approaches and so on. In reference to the requirements of the new English Curriculum Criteria, along with the practical situations in vocabulary teaching in senior schools, some general principles on vocabulary teaching and the main contents of English vocabulary are clarified in the paper. The author suggests a dozen efficient methods of vocabulary teaching, such as teaching vocabulary with games; teaching vocabulary by making good use of morphology; teaching vocabulary by associating; teaching vocabulary according to the context; teaching vocabulary with intuitive methods etc. Finally, the author conducts a teaching and learning experiment by flexibly employing some of the discussed methods or techniques. The author describes the whole process, makes both qualitative & quantitative analyses and succeeds in confirming the effectiveness and feasibility of the discussed methods or techniques of EVTL in Chinese middle schools.At the end of the thesis, the author draws the following conclusion. Although middle school students in China are required to acquire a larger English vocabulary, as long as we optimize methods or techniques that are suitable for EVTL, bring students’ initiative into full play, and make efforts to create a good learning atmosphere we are bound to gain twice the result with half the effort, achieve satisfactory efficiency in EVTL and greatly enhance our students’ language communicative ability.In this thesis the author takes a premier exploration of effective classroom activities for lexical learning, hoping that it can offer some implication on practical teaching and at the same time inspire future research.