The Application Of Semantic Field Theory In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

As we all know, vocabulary is the basic element in a language which plays a critical role in language acquisition. Wilkins once said "Without grammar very little can be said, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed"(Wilkins,1987). Vocabulary is of vital importance in the process of language acquisition.In China, though high school teachers gradually realized the importance of vocabulary, due to lack of guidance of vocabulary teaching theories and effective vocabulary teaching methods, most of the teachers merely lay emphasis on mechanical repetition and vocabulary accumulation while ignoring the semantic relations and the connections between words, which leads to mechanical memory is very common among senior high school students in their vocabulary learning. As a result, vocabulary instruction is considered to be time-consuming and low efficiency and still a weak part in senior high schools in a long period.Based on such situation of vocabulary teaching, semantic field teaching approach was suggested adopting into English vocabulary teaching in senior high school. In this thesis the writer tries to integrate the paradigmatic relations with syntagmatic relations to construct different semantic field (i.e. hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy, collocation), with the view of enlarging students’vocabulary size and deepen their mastery of vocabulary knowledge. Thus,it revealed the effectiveness of semantic field teaching approach of vocabulary instruction in senior high schools.This thesis is a systematic study on teaching vocabulary by means of constructing semantic field of words. It has made use of experimental research, in which the writer selects85senior high students of No.3middle school in Tonghua, Jilin province as the experiment subjects. They are divided into control class and the experimental class respectively. The teaching experiment lasted18weeks.Four tests were conducted before and after the experiment, followed by a questionnaire, in order to verify these three questions.1) Will semantic field teaching approach yields superior results in facilitating students’vocabulary learning compared with traditional teaching methods?2) Whether semantic field teaching approach facilitates the depth of vocabulary knowledge?3) What are students’attitudes towards the effect of semantic field teaching approach on their vocabulary learning?In this thesis, the researcher adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Through employing SPSS, students’pre-test and post-test results were analyzed by means of Independent Samples T Test and Paired Samples T Test, and according to the comparisons and analysis of the testing results the following conclusions were reached: 1)There was almost no significant difference between control class and experimental class in the pre-test. While after the experiment, the results of the English vocabulary test II showed that experimental class scored higher than control class, in other words, semantic field teaching approach works better in the aspect of facilitating students’ acquisition of vocabulary than that of the traditional methods.2) The results of vocabulary knowledge scale indicated that the test scores of experimental class in the aspect of vocabulary knowledge was obviously better than that of the control class. That is to say, the semantic field teaching approach does facilitate students’ acquisition of the depth of vocabulary knowledge.3) The results of questionnaire revealed that the students in the experimental class generally agreed that semantic field teaching approach was more efficient than the traditional methods.Moreover, words learnt by means of constructing semantic field deepened the understanding of the words and could be retained longer in their memory. Therefore, semantic field teaching approach is effective and feasible in senior high school.