Application Of Context Theories In Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools

The teaching and learning of vocabulary have been great concerns for many English teachers and learners, for vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to language users. English linguist D. Wilkins said,’Without grammar little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed’. Thus, many scholars at home and abroad have focused their research on how to optimize the teaching of English vocabulary to improve students’capacity of vocabulary application in communication. But in the traditional teaching mode, teachers are accustomed to adopting the "duck-filling" method to instill knowledge into the minds of their students while students recite the words and expressions by rote learning, and can’t use them properly, for the teaching of vocabulary independent of context and lack of context input can only make students remember the meaning of words mechanically, and therefore neglect the context the words are in and the context knowledge of words.In order to carry out English vocabulary instruction effectively and raise students’ capability of vocabulary application, namely, using them correctly in the context, the writer of this paper conducted a vocabulary instruction experiment, which aims at researching the effect of the method of teaching English vocabulary to senior middle school students based on the theory of context.107students from Senior Two in Hangtian Middle School in Hohhot were chosen and divided into two different groups. They participated in a sixteen-week training program. The experimental group was trained by a context-based approach, while the control group was taught in a traditional way. The following two research questions were answered:1) Teaching vocabulary in context can improve the students’ interest in vocabulary learning and has a positive influence on developing the students’ vocabulary learning strategy.2) Teaching vocabulary in context is beneficial in developing students’ competence of vocabulary application. During the experiment, a questionnaire and two vocabulary tests were given to the students by the researcher. In the end, the results were analyzed by SPSS. The findings show that the scores of the experimental class in which vocabularies are taught through the systematic context-based approach are much better than those of the control class in which vocabularies are taught mainly through traditional method. Therefore, the author discovers that learning vocabulary in context is more helpful in improving senior high school learners’interest in vocabulary learning and their vocabulary application. Furthermore, it has a positive influence on developing their vocabulary learning strategy.