Application Of The Context Theory To Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Vocabulary is the most important one of the three major components that constituteEnglish language and it is the foundation of any kind of communication. No matter howgood one’s grammar is, if he does’t have enough vocabulary to express his own feelings orto understand others’ opinions, he can still not communicate with others in this language.At the same time, vocabulary plays a critical role in English teaching. However,vocabulary learning is one of the biggest obstacles in foreign language study. Therefore, itis of great importance to make a research on vocabulary strategies and its teachingmethods.In recent years, many teachers devote themselves to the research of applying contexttheory to the vocabulary teaching. But most of the researches are inclined to university andsenior high school. This thesis mainly studies the vocabulary teaching in junior middleschool through context-based approach. Two hypotheses are examined. The first one iswhether teaching vocabulary through context-based approach can stimulate students’interest in vocabulary learning and have an influence on students’ learning strategy onvocabulary. The second one is whether teaching vocabulary in context can be beneficial todevelop students’ proficiency of vocabulary.Two questionnaires and two vocabulary tests are given to the students by theresearcher during the twelve weeks’ experiment. The results indicate that the scores of theexperimental class in which vocabularies are taught through context-based approach aremuch better than those of the control class in which vocabularies are taught mainly throughtraditional approach. The study suggests that teaching vocabulary in context can improvethe students’ proficiency of vocabulary application. In addition, teaching vocabulary incontext is able to activate students’ interest and can have a positive influence on students’vocabulary learning strategy.