Application Of Effective Strategies For Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools

Lexis serves as the foundation of English acquisition, whoseimportance in language learning and teaching has received a wideacknowledgment. However, there still exist many problems: such asstudents’ complaint that words are easily forgotten or teachers’ view thatlexis learning is student’ own affair and they needn’t carry out effectivelexis teaching. Such poor instruction of vocabulary leads to slow processof students’ acquisition of English or inefficiency of teachers’ instruction.The New Curriculum Standards for English, however, puts forwardhigher requirements of teaching as well as learning. To this point, it is areal focus to direct teachers how to carry out lexis instruction effectively.This paper tries to solve the following questions through the investigationof current teaching situation and empirical research on lexis teaching:how to stimulate students’ learning interest, how to help them expandvocabulary size successfully and how to improve their efficiency in lexislearning.With the methodology of the questionnaire and empirical research,this paper discusses the effective teaching strategies on lexis teaching.Firstly, this paper summarizes the time-consuming and less effectivesituation of current lexis teaching, and then analyzes the reasons to this dilemma, including teachers’ vocabulary teaching in isolation, instructionwith blurry focus and misplaced priority, students’learning by rote, a lackof recurrent process and lack of systematic clue. On the basis of theteaching principles and other theories, the author discusses six effectiveteaching strategies on lexis teaching, such as strategies of game teaching,strategies of associative approach, strategies of classification teaching,strategies of context teaching, strategies of chunks teaching and strategiesof cultural-association. After that, the author applies these abovestrategies to teaching practice, making use of2classes each with60students, in which experimental class receives new teaching approacheswhile the controlled class receives traditional ones. Before and after theresearch the students are asked to finish a test, the results of which will beanalyzed by SPSS13.0. And the results shows clear improvement of theexperimental class, after which, the paper analyzes the questionnaire forstudents to know their attitudes to these strategies and lexis learning. Inthe end, this paper points out implications of the findings and thelimitations.