A Study Of The Design Of Vocabulary Activities In Junior Textbooks And Teachers’ Use Of Vocabulary Activities In Classroom Teaching

This paper, based on Nation’s vocabulary knowledge framework, reports a study of the vocabularyknowledge in Go for it published by the People’s Education Press in2006. It is intended to evaluate whatand how vocabulary knowledge is presented in this series of textbook, including the layout and presentationof new words, the underlying assumptions behind the design of vocabulary activities and exercises.Firstly, the thesis attempts a review of the theories of textbook evaluation as well as studies onvocabulary design. Then a descriptive analysis was adopted to analyze the textbooks. During the first stage,statistic information was collected by analyzing the textbook. Then, at the second stage, a survey was madeamong teachers by employing a questionnaire and classroom observation table. The data was analyzedaccording to certain criteria. After analyzing, the writer found out the following features of Go for it. Thearrangement of new words is reasonable; the vocabulary design is mainly based on Nation’s framework ofvocabulary knowledge classification framework.There are varieties of vocabulary learning activities and vocabulary exercises, which are helpful to thestudents’ English learning. However, classroom observations reveal that the teachers cannot make best useof these vocabulary activities in textbooks. They just taught literal meanings of a word and failed to drawtheir students’ attention to the form and use of a word. They also failed to correctly understand theintentions of the text writers in their design of the vocabulary activities. It is therefore suggested thatteachers should have a better understanding of what constitutes vocabulary knowledge and how form,meaning and use can be taught to their students.It should be noted that the analysis of the design of vocabulary activities in textbooks and teachers’use of these activities is still an emerging research topic, so the methodology in this thesis remains to beimproved in future research. The limitations of this paper lie mainly in the limited number of researchparticipants. Further studies are encouraged to have a larger sample.