Research On Vocabulary Exercise Design In Oxford High School English Textbooks

The importance of vocabulary has been widely recognized. It plays a veryimportant role in both communication and foreign language learning. Unfortunatelymany students have many problems with vocabulary, such as memorizing new words,lacking of vocabulary, encountering plenty of new words in reading. Effectivevocabulary exercises can solve these problems by helping the students to rememberand consolidate the new words, and let them know how to use the words. Goodvocabulary exercises can also make the students realize how to expand vocabulary.Textbooks are crucial for learning and vocabulary exercises are very important partsof them. The writer, therefore, decided to research the vocabulary exercises inOxford High School English Textbook Shanghai Edition because it is widely used inShanghai.The research questions are:1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the vocabulary exercisedesign in the textbooks?2. What are the possible problems of vocabulary exercise design?3. What improvements can be made in vocabulary exercise design?This thesis takes S2A and S2B for the two semesters of Grade Two as thesamples. The relevant theories and research are reviewed, and they are thefoundation of the thesis. Based on the criteria, a series of checklists are constructed,and then the quantitative data and qualitative data are collected accordingly, andanalyzed according to the theories reviewed in the chapter two. Two questionnairesare conducted to assist the internal evaluation.After this investigation, the writer discovered that generally thevocabulary exercises are designed in accordance with the exercise design criteria andmaterial writing criteria, and the exercises reflect the vocabulary learning theories,but only one exercise concerns organizing the learned words, and no exercisesprovide any information about affixation. The exercises are not diversified either.The quantity of vocabulary exercises in the Key Words and More Reading is relatively small, so more exercises are needed. In the textbooks, there is alsoanother kind of vocabulary exercise, word repetition, which is called informalvocabulary exercise in the thesis. With respect to this kind of exercise, or wordrepetition, the thesis found that:1) More nouns are repeated in the books compared to other lexicalcategories;2) There are simple repetition and complex repetition in the textbooks,and simple repetition is more beneficial in consolidating vocabulary, but one form ofcomplex repetition, words and their derivations, is also significant.Because the informal vocabulary exercises are in fact word repetition,the more times the words are repeated, the larger the quantity of the informalvocabulary exercises is. This thesis shows that in each unit the repetition frequencyof the new words in the textbooks is not low (on average56%of vocabulary isrepeated2or more times in the units where they are introduced), but the majority ofthe vocabulary does not appear in the later units, so there is still room to increasethe repetition frequency, which the thesis also goes into.