A Study On Learning Vocabulary Through Reading Of Senior One Students

Vocabulary is an essential component of a language and the foundation of all language skills. Therefore, vocabulary learning is critical for all language learners. As for the senior high school students, enlarging vocabulary size is an important way to improve their English ability. With the development of new course reform of high school teaching, the New English Curriculum Standards has raised the requirement for vocabulary learning, bringing a greater challenge for English teachers and students. Faced with such challenge, English teachers have been searching for efficient ways to help students enlarge their vocabulary size in which students can grasp different usages of words and use the words in real communication.Traditional vocabulary teaching method takes lots of time and energy of the teachers and the students, and is inefficient. Under this teaching method, many of the students can’t meet the requirement for vocabulary set in the New Curriculum Standards and even lose interest in learning English. In this case, more and more teachers are trying new ways of vocabulary teaching, one of which is teaching vocabulary through reading class. Based on the results of a large number of experiments home and abroad, many experts and English teachers have confirmed that learning vocabulary through reading is an efficient way in enlarging vocabulary size. Meanwhile, they pointed out that without instruction, students could gain a small quantity of words and have bad vocabulary retention because many factors influence the effect of learning, for example, reading materials’topic familiarity, and different reading tasks.The purpose of my study was to explore proper and effective ways to help senior high school students enlarge their vocabulary size. In the experiment, we compared the effect of traditional vocabulary teaching method and the method of learning vocabulary through reading and compared the effect of the most commonly used four reading tasks on vocabulary learning and retention. The results showed that both traditional vocabulary teaching method and learning vocabulary through reading had their own advantages. Traditional vocabulary teaching method had advantage in helping students understand and memorize the new words immediately, while learning vocabulary through reading played a significant role in the retention of the vocabulary. The result of comparing the four reading tasks confirmed Laufer’s involvement load hypothesis, the heavier loaded task can cause better vocabulary learning and retention. Through the comparison within the groups, we could see that the language proficiency had significant effect on learners’ vocabulary learning and retention. The students with higher English proficiency could benefit more in vocabulary learning through reading.My research may have some positive effect on senior high school students’ vocabulary teaching. However, owing to the author’s limited research level, many problems remain to be proved and discussed in further studies.