An Empirical Study On Narrative Approach In Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary teaching is vital in the process of learners’ ESL learning. However, studentsstill tend to mechanical or rote-learning in this aspect. To address such a problem in thepresent situation, new and creative teaching methods are in great need. The author chose thetopic from the perspective of the requirements for English vocabulary in the New EnglishCurriculum for Senior High School and the present situation of vocabulary teaching andlearning in China and put forward the view of applying narrative approach to senior highschool English vocabulary teaching, based on the theory of narrative approach.Narrative approach is an idea about language teaching which proposes that a certainteaching process of language items, such as a text, a paragraph, a language point, agrammatical item, should be designed and presented in a narrative way. The application ofnarrative approach can create an authentic situation, which makes the students devoted to thesituation constructed through narration, and adequately exert their mental abilities such asemotion, imagination, creation, etc. and finally acquire language in the cognitive activitiesintegrated with real-life. Meanwhile narrative approach also refers to a teaching method andcovers all kinds of specific teaching techniques. It integrates the factors of approach, methodand technique into one entity.The author conducts a teaching experiment in order to testify the effect of the approach invocabulary teaching. To be more accurate, the experiment is designed to solve the followingquestions:1. After the implementation of the narrative approach, will the students’ learning interest andattitudes be improved in the experimental class?2. Will the narrative approach improve the students’ vocabulary competence and theintegrated competence more than the traditional teaching method?The author chose two parallel groups for comparison.125senior high school students whocome from two classes of grade one in Huairen High School Shanxi Province are selected asthe research subjects. The teacher applies narrative approach to the experimental class (EC)while the traditional teaching method to the control class (CC). During the experiment, thepre-test is given to both classes and the post-test is given after3-month experiment to thesame subjects. Besides, the author made a survey of students in the experimental class via aquestionnaire at the end of the experiment. Finally, the author adopts the SPSS.17.0toanalyze the experimental data and conducts the T-test for independent sample. The data showthat there exist no obvious differences between the EC and CC regarding vocabularycompetence and integrated competence before the experiment while there exit differencesbetween them both in vocabulary competence and integrated competence after the experiment which implies the bigger improvement of experimental class compared with the scores of thecontrol class. The students of experimental class show greater interest in vocabulary learningand they learn English more actively.The results of the study show that the application of narrative approach can improve thestudents’ vocabulary competence and integrated competence to some extent. The research isassumed to shed some implications on senior high school English vocabulary teaching.Meanwhile, it provides some suggestions for further research. The author’s application ofnarrative approach to the senior high school vocabulary teaching is only an attempt and, to acertain degree, of some originality. However, it inevitably has some limitations due to thelimited samples in the experiment and the limited time for the experiment.