A Study Of The Application Of Contextual Theory On English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Schools

Vocabulary teaching is of vital importance in learning English well. However, there are serious problems in vocabulary teaching and learning. The teachers focus on the Chinese translation and spellings, while the students memorize words mechanically, but there is no evident increase on the vocabulary size; they have difficulty in using vocabulary in the practice. Therefore, the paper explores a study of the application of contextual theory on vocabulary teaching and learning, attempting to test the hypotheses through the experiment:The application of the contextual theories can have a better effect on enlarging the vocabulary and promote the students to use words properly in the context and improve their reading ability.The subjects are Senior One students in Shuanggang Middle school. The vocabulary size and reading competence in the experimental class are similar to those in the control class. In the experiment, the author still adopts the grammar-translation method in the CC, while teaching vocabulary in the EC, the author attempts to create various contexts based on the reading texts. The paper adopted the questionnaire, conducted the pre-test and post-test during the experiment,and analyzed the data collected from the tests. The results show that after the application of contextual theory on vocabulary teaching and learning in the EC, the EC has obvious advantage over the CC about the performance on vocabulary size and reading competence, and then the hypothesis are proved correct.Based on the researches on contextual theory at home and abroad, the paper attempts to improve the effective teaching practice on vocabulary teaching and learning. In the experiment, the author explores the text resources and creates contexts, where the new words are presented, the meaning and usages are guessed, and the words are consolidated and used properly. The findings are that the contextual theory on vocabulary teaching can inspire the students’ interest in learning vocabulary, and then enlarge the vocabulary and improve reading competence. Therefore, the teacher should create contexts as much as possible to guide the students to learn the new words in the context, and finally improve their competence in utilizing words in the real context.