An Empirical Study On Primary-School English Teaching Based On Vocabulary Associative Strategy

Vocabulary is the building material of language, and It is an important means weform out thought. Language would have no practical significance if there were novocabulary. No matter how good and correct one’s grammar is and how beautifulone’s pronunciation is, if he has no adequate vocabulary to express his own feelingsor to understand other’s opinions, he still cannot communicate with others in thislanguage. So in foreign language teaching and learning, it’s very important to doresearch on language learning strategy and vocabulary teaching methods.In the year of2003, the Ministry of Education issued a “full-time compulsoryeducation in senior middle school English curriculum standards (trial version),” whichrequires pupils to master600-700words at the primary stage. In our actual teachingpractice, most teachers find that in learning English memorizing vocabulary is a bigobstacle for pupils. And it is essential for teachers find a good and proper way to helppupils to learn English words. After a broad and careful review of the related literatureavailable, the author of this thesis, with the help of her long-time teaching experience,attempts to propose association-based words teaching and learning model in Englishvocabulary teaching in primary schoolsIn order to verify the effectiveness of the teaching modal, the author of this thesiscarried an experiment, which is intended to answer the two questions:(1) Can associative strategy training improve pupils’ English achievements?(2) Can associative strategy training increase pupils’ interests in vocabulary andEnglish learning?The experiment is done on97students from Grade Four of Jinding No.1Primary School of Zhuhai High-tech Zone. It was carried out on March7th,2011. andended on May27th,2011. It lasted about12weeks. The students were divided into theexperimental class and the control class. During the experiment, the model ofassociation-based words teaching and learning was employed for words learning inthe experimental class, whereas the traditional method was applied for words learningin the control class. Meanwhile, both quantitative and qualitative methods were usedin the study, and the data was processed by SPSS(11.0). The analysis of the data shows the students in the experimental class did better in words learning and the resultof the interview and the observation from the teacher prove that the students in theexperimental class changed more in their learning styles and interests.Through the analysis of the results of the experiment, the author of thesis comes tothe conclusions as follows: Association-based words teaching and learning is feasibleand valid in that it significantly promotes the students’ English achievements.Associative strategy training can increase pupils’ interests in vocabulary and Englishlearning.