On The Application Of Association Memory Strategy In The Vocabulary Teaching Of Senior High School

Words’ learning is the center of the English study and the basis of communication. When English teaching and students’ English competence of comprehensive application have made great progress, we have to stress that high school students have a small size of vocabulary, which badly influences their improvement of English comprehensive ability. Students are still taught in inefficient ways, which teachers always ask the students to remember vocabulary by themselves and the students memorize them by rote repetition. As a result, they forget them easily soon. The students themselves cannot master the vocabulary well; therefore teachers need to help them remember words to reduce the overload burden of memorizing vocabulary.On the basis of a review on the related literature available and comparative study among different strategies, special attention is paid to the depth information processing based association strategy in the present study and association-based words teaching and learning model is proposed, the procedure of words learning in class and activities on vocabulary learning is proposed as well. Among them the author emphasizes on the sound association, paronymous association and synonymous association. They are based on the depth of word processing, thus they can keep a longer memory than rote repetition. In the process of the vocabulary teaching, it is useful for students retaining new words, consolidate the learned words and improve the language ability by applying different appropriate approaches toward different features of words.The present study aims to test the following hypotheses:1) Depth of Information Processing Theory based association memory strategy can facilitate students’ ability of words learning;2) Association-based model can reduce students’ burden of retaining vocabulary and stimulate the interests of learning English;3) Vocabulary association memory strategy can consolidate words learned in junior middle school.The author carried out an experiment on two classes from the Panshan County High school. During the experiment, the model of association-based words teaching was conducted in the experimental class, whereas the traditional approach was employed in the control class. At the same time, both of the questionnaires and vocabulary tests are used to test the students. From the analysis of the data, we can see that the students in the experimental class did better in words acquisition than control class. The strategy turned out to be effective17weeks later.This thesis testifies the feasibility of the strategy of words association and comes to a positive conclusion after conducting the experiment in real classroom. The strategy not only helped teachers improve their vocabulary teaching. What’s more, it can help students’ mastering words effectively and clear away the main obstacle in English learning.