Empirical Research On The Topic-based English Vocabulary Teaching In Rural Middle School

For a long time, vocabulary memory and use is an important part of English learning.Vocabulary memory has always been a major headache in English teaching. In China,students generally report that they cannot remember English words, or they forget the wordseasily. Their forgetting rate is high and they can’t use the words learned freely. Junior Englishvocabulary is crucial to lay a solid foundation for English learning. So its importance is self-evident. However, due to the limited English learning capacity of the rural middle schoolstudents, they usually use rote, mechanical ways to remember words, which makesvocabulary memory more difficult. Their English proficiency is low.With the deepening of the English teaching reform, English teaching presented a newchallenge to foreign language teachers."New Curriculum Standard" proposes to learn wordsin the application, and to focus on fun teaching in junior high school. The topic-basedvocabulary teaching method is an effective way to improve students’ interest. It has greatsignificance to explore strategies of English vocabulary fun teaching in junior high school inthe New Curriculum background.The author selected two classes from Jishi Middle School in Anze County as subjects toconduct the experiment. Their English levels are basically the same. And two questionnairesare carried out. After the pre-test, the experimental class is taught with the topic-basedvocabulary teaching method while the control class is taught in the traditional way. At the endof the experiment, a post-test is conducted. The data are analyzed by using the Social Sciencessoftware package (SPSS17.0version) for statistical processing. The author attempts toanswer two questions:1) whether topics-based vocabulary teaching method can effectivelypromote students’ vocabulary memory and the growth of their vocabulary knowledgecompared with the traditional vocabulary teaching method?2) Whether topics-basedvocabulary teaching method can improve students’ English vocabulary learning strategies? We found that through the experiment the topic-based vocabulary teaching method canpromote the growth of vocabulary knowledge and can also improve students’ interest inlearning vocabulary. This way is an effective method for both students and teachers to changetheir way of vocabulary memory. Therefore, it can be used in our English class.