An Experimental Study On The Application Of Experiential Learning To Teaching Of The Pragmatic Use Of English Vocabulary

With the development of the global economic integration, each country further enhances the exchange, foreign language teaching becomes important day by day. Vocabulary learning is an essential part of foreign language teaching. At the same time, it is always a difficult and focal point in the teaching of college English, which is the major barrier in improving students’ vocabulary ability as well. In recent years, with EL springing up, some scholars research many findings about the Experiential Learning theory to improve English level. However, special studies on Experiential Learning theory applied to the proficiency of English vocabulary pragmatic use are paid less attention to. Teachers always regard vocabulary learning simply as improving the students’ vocabulary size or teaching the literal meaning of the words, especially for non-English majors, which is what this thesis explored.The Experiential Learning theory is a student-centered process, which encourages the students to join in the class actively and to construct knowledge, obtain skills and improve themselves to achieve a better result by own real experience. It pays attention to the students’ initial and concrete experience, emphasizes factors of prior experience affecting new knowledge. The students get some new knowledge and skills by autonomous learning during the knowledge building process, which can make the students’ self-improvement more.The students have low enthusiasm and weak interest in learning English, besides, the way of teaching vocabulary is boring and teacher-centered. Therefore, by the experimental research on the application of Experiential Learning to teaching of the pragmatic use of English vocabulary, it puts forward two hypotheses followed by answers: 1) Whether Experiential Learning applied in the pragmatic use of English vocabulary can improve students’ intrinsic motivation. 2) Whether Experiential Learning can improve students’ proficiency of pragmatic use of English vocabulary.In this research the participants contained are non-English majors from two separate classes(the size being 51, respectively) of Shijiazhuang Medical College. All of the participants were instructed to the Experimental Class(EC) and Control Class(CC) which belongs to the colleague. During one semester’s English vocabulary pragmatic use teaching, students in the Experimental Class received EL, while students in the Control Class still received the traditional learning. After the experiment the author used SPSS 17.0 to analyze the data collected from the questionnaire, interview and test papers. Based on the data collection, a conclusion can be drawn that the application of Experiential Learning approach in the college vocabulary learning does improve students’ intrinsic motivation and ability of English vocabulary pragmatic use, and then sets up a new model about experiential pragmatic use of English vocabulary, which can be beneficial for improving the teaching quality of college English and non-English majors’ English level.