An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Creating Meaningful Contexts In Senior English Vocabulary Learning

The New English Curriculum Criteria makes a requirement for a higher vocabulary ability of the students. According to High School English Curriculum Criteria, the volume of vocabulary learned adds up to about4500words and a certain number of idiomatic expressions and fixed collocations. In this grade, students are required to choose proper vocabulary to communicate and express based on relative factors such as communicative topics, occasions, interpersonal relationship and so on. Under the direction of the Criteria, it is a key question how to effectively conduct vocabulary teaching and learning to improve students’synthetic ability of language application. Contexts play an important part in vocabulary learning. Without contexts, any word will be meaningless. Language learning is itself part of life and thus life should be a teaching resource in vocabulary learning. Students create meaningful contexts to learn vocabulary and use vocabulary through real activities and tasks, which is based on student-centered principle.The study is based on humanistic learning theory, constructivist learning theory, and level of processing mode. The research method includes the references method, survey research and interview. It explores whether creating meaningful contexts facilitate vocabulary learning and activates students’motivation and initiative in vocabulary learning, and helps them to flexibly adopt all kinds of learning strategies and improve learning efficiency. The teacher conducts an experiment to explore whether creating meaningful contexts can have good effects on vocabulary learning. The research subjects are108students from two average liberal arts classes of Grade Two in Xinyi No.2middle school in Guangdong. Class One is the experimental group and Class Two is the control group. The experiment time is one term. Before the experiment, both groups fill out a questionnaire about students’vocabulary learning beliefs and finish a pre-test for vocabulary knowledge. The result of the questionnaire shows that most students think that words should be acquired in context and learn through use. The participants in the experimental group receive the learning method of creating meaningful contexts. They are divided in groups to discuss the key vocabulary of each unit, and then integrates the words into several topics. The creation of contexts is based on the knowledge and experience of the students. Through activities such as duty report, writing, word dictation, retelling and rewriting, they learn to use vocabulary, adopt flexible learning strategies, and make self-evaluation on vocabulary learning. The control class adopted the traditional teaching method, that is, reading aloud——explaining——summarizing——drilling——review. After the experiment, both groups finish a post-test for vocabulary knowledge. Then the teacher compares the results of the two tests and also refers to the final exam to understand the correlation between the change of lexical competence and English proficiency. The experimental data shows that the participants in the experimental group make a more significant improvement in learning ability and there’s a raise in vocabulary size compared with the control group.