A Study Of English Vocabulary Teaching Strategies In High Schools

Vocabulary is very important to language learning. The British linguist D. A. Wilkinsonce said,“Without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can beconveyed.”(Wilkins, 1972) Therefore, vocabulary learning should be highly valued in thecourse of language learning. Only in this way can we achieve success in language acquisition,especially at the primary stage of language learning.English, which is called one of the three major subjects in high school, deserves more ofour attention. It takes up 120 points in the College Entrance Examination, which is quite alarge percentage indeed. It is important to have a good foundation in learning a language well.Language is composed of three main parts: phonetics, vocabulary and grammar, in whichvocabulary is essential. Successful language learning depends on one’s vocabulary in somedegree, and mastering a certain number of words can help improve students’English leveland their ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Vocabulary plays a more andmore important role in high school, and the College Entrance Examination has called for themastery of more words in recent years. The number of words high school students shouldmaster ranges from 3300 to 3500.However, in high school, English is still taught for the purpose of examinations. So now,the English teaching in high school still centers on grammar and reading, while vocabularyteaching is sometimes ignored. For many years, linguists both at home and abroad have donea lot of researches in vocabulary teaching from different aspects, and have put forward manyuseful vocabulary teaching and learning strategies. But due to the fact that many teachers andstudents don’t pay enough attention to vocabulary teaching and learning, and don’t have theguide of teaching and learning strategies, vocabulary study in high school has been leftbehind. According to the author’s literature review, there are few, if any, researches intovocabulary learning strategies intended for high school students.Through the 9 years’high school English teaching experience and communication andobservation of high school students, the author has found that it is necessary to guide studentsin strategies, and the strategies that were used in her teaching of vocabulary have been provedeffectively. The strategies are: teaching pronunciation and spelling; teaching word-formation; teaching collocations; teaching words according to context and teaching learning strategies.In order to make the methods more convincing, the author carries out an experiment.The experimental class (Class 17) and the control class (Class 18) are both from AttachedHigh School of Shandong Normal University. First a pre-test was designed to see if the twoclasses were at the same level of ability in grasping vocabulary. At the same time, thestudents and teachers did questionnaires respectively for the author to find out problemsexisting in vocabulary learning and teaching. In the period of experiment, the experimentalclass was guided by vocabulary learning strategies while traditional vocabulary teachingmethods were employed in the control class. The author also did research into students’learning style and tried to let students know their learning style so as to improve their studymore effectively. After 5 months of experiment, a post-test was designed to find out if thestrategies are effective. Compared with the pre-test, the data drawn from the post-testsuggests that teaching vocabulary learning strategies to students can enlarge students’vocabulary size and can make students interested and confident in English study.In order to prove the above conclusion, the structure of the thesis is as follows:Chapter one introduces the significance of vocabulary learning, the relevant problems, theresearch background and the questions to be answered in the research. Chapter two is theliterature review. Chapter three focuses on the application of vocabulary teaching strategiesto high school students. First, it introduces some vocabulary teaching strategies, such asword-formation, contexts, pronunciation and spelling, guessing and so on. Second, anexperiment is performed with two chosen classes (one as experimental class and the other ascontrol class). Then, results are analyzed to draw latitudinal and longitudinal comparison ofthe pre-test and post-test between the two classes to find out whether a distinctive differenceexists between the two classes. Chapter four is the conclusion of the thesis includingthemajor findings and suggestions. In this chapter, the author offers some findings of her studyand experiment. Then make some suggestions on vocabulary teaching. The author also givesan overall summary of the study and points out some limitations and problems still remainingto be solved.Although there are some limitations in the author’s experiment, this is still a beneficialattempt. The author will make further study on English teaching so as to guide her English teaching and students’English learning.