A Survey On The Use Of English Vocabulary Teaching Strategies In Senior High School

As one of the key elements in foreign language teaching, vocabulary teaching has puzzled teachers ofEnglish in China. Many teachers tried their ways to help students learn the vocabulary more effectively, butthe result is not so apparent. Since1970s, linguists abroad have begun to pay much attention to the use ofthe strategies in vocabulary teaching. They have carried out many experiments to show that some of thestrategies used in vocabulary teaching can make vocabulary teaching more effective. Besides, they’vefound that more than20vocabulary teaching strategies can be used in classroom vocabulary teaching. Athome, there are also researchers who did some researches about the effectiveness of vocabulary teachingstrategies. But these researches focus only on one or two kinds of vocabulary teaching strategies, and manyof the researches lie on the vocabulary strategies of foreign language teaching in university, ignoring theuse of English vocabulary teaching strategies in senior high school. So this thesis is aimed at investigatingthe situation of the use of vocabulary teaching strategies in senior high school.In this study,26teachers and517students who are from High School Attached to Northwest NormalUniversity were assigned randomly as the subjects, based on the previous researches on Englishvocabulary teaching strategies both at home and abroad. The author carried on a survey research on the useof vocabulary teaching strategy and employed questionnaires and interviews to collect data to answer thefollowing three research questions:1) What kind of vocabulary teaching strategies is frequently used bythe teachers in senior high school?2) What kind of vocabulary teaching strategies do the students like?3)Are the vocabulary teaching strategies used by the teachers welcomed by the students? Finally, SPSS18.0was employed to analyze the data obtained from the questionnaires and interview.Based on the analysis and results of the data, the conclusions are found as follows:1) Teachers in theHigh School Attached to Northwest Normal University often use vocabulary teaching strategies, and mostof them often use word formation strategy, collocation strategy and context strategy, while groupingstrategy and description strategy are not widely used.2) Students in Grade One like context strategy,description strategy and word formation strategy best. Students in Grade Two like context strategy, wordformation strategy and semantic relationship strategy. Students in Grade Three like context strategy, wordformation strategy and description strategy.3) The vocabulary teaching strategies used by teachers are notwelcomed by students.At the end of the thesis, the author suggests teachers should know the students’ favorite strategies so that they can use the strategies favored by the students to give lessons. At the same time, teachers shouldguide students to identify which strategies used in vocabulary teaching are more effective and try to usethem.