English Vocabulary Teaching Based On Context Theory In Senior High School

The most important purpose of senior high school English teaching is to improve the students’ abilities in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Nevertheless, students’ reading abilities account for50points(1/3) in the NMET. So teachers have been focusing on how to train and improve the students’ reading abilities. However, one of the most important factors that influence students’ reading comprehension is vocabulary, being one of the most basic elements in various situations. The basic unit of sentence or context is words, because many morphemes cannot stand or work alone, they have to be combined with other morphemes to form a meaningful word. If there were no words, there would be no sentences. Linguist Wilkins in his famous book Linguistic and Language Teaching said,"Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed". Evidently, words have been playing a very important role in English learning. If the words in a sentence fail to appear in a fixed order required by the convention of a language, one tends to produce all utterances either ungrammatically or nonsensically at all (Hu Zhuanglin). However, meanings of words are shown by certain sentences or contexts. In different contexts, the same word may get a distinctively different meanings. Through experiment, the author proves that vocabulary acquisition in context can improve students’ interest in vocabulary learning and has a positive effect on developing students’ vocabulary learning strategy. It also helps students enhance their vocabulary and improve their integral English competence. This thesis consists of five chapters. In Chapter One, the author firstly gives a description of the current vocabulary teaching situation and the significance of the present study, and then puts forward three hypotheses on whether context has a positive effect on students’ vocabulary acquisition. In Chapter Two, she mainly deals with two important concepts-context and vocabulary teaching. On the one hand, the author traces the development of the studies on context theories both abroad and at home, its classifications and functions. And on the other hand, the author makes a discussion of the definition of vocabulary, its width and depth, and the historical trends in vocabulary teaching. The purpose of this part is to provide a theoretical basis for the suggestions of how to teach English vocabulary from context in Chapter Three. Chapter Three introduces the design of the experiment and its detailed procedure. The author proposes a systematic model of vocabulary teaching in middle school, that is, the application of context theory in the training process. In Chapter Four, through data collection and data analysis, the author testified that her hypotheses were correct. Chapter Five is the conclusion of the whole thesis, in which the author points out the limitations and suggestions for further research.