The Action Research Into Context-based Approaches To High School English Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary is a critical aspect of language knowledge and serves as the basis for the development of language skills. English learning in High School is an essential part of learning English, which leads to teaching vocabulary to a fundamental aspect of the discussion, exploration and research on high school English teaching theory and application. In traditional approaches to teaching, due to bad learning habits, many high school students fail to understand the precise meaning of more complex words or ideas. As a result, students are often unable to freely and properly use higher level vocabulary in writing and speech. The flaw in traditional teaching methods lies in two specific areas. The first is that students often study the linguistic background or context of a new word; this may be due to a lack of context input in the classroom from the teacher. Furthermore, students also often struggle with discriminating homographs and synonymous words. In order to solve these two problems, it is necessary to employ vocabulary teaching methods that emphasize learning by explaining new vocabulary with contextual strategies. As a result, there is a desired and efficient way to grow the contextual knowledge of students and to develop their skills of using context and context strategies with context input consciously.The purpose of this paper is to explore how to make improvements in the framework of teaching high school English vocabulary. This paper first reviews the literature on vocabulary and context, including different definitions and categories of vocabulary, contents of vocabulary teaching, views and methodologies of teaching vocabulary as well as functions and types of context. It then goes on to analyze the functions and applications of context theory in teaching and learning vocabulary. It is hoped that the review and exploration can be of benefit to high school English teachers in order to shape their systematic understanding of the contents and values of context application in teaching and learning English. It is also hoped that this study can provide theoretical guidance for applying context theories.The action research on context-based vocabulary teaching discusses the purpose, tools, problems and action plan of this topic followed by the based theories and the specific introduction of the procedure. Furthermore, it’s proved to be effective after communicating, interviewing and doing surveys with two experimental classes of a senior high school.