Towards A Context-based Approach To Senior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

We know that vocabulary plays a significant role in English learning. In The NewStandard of National English Curriculum for Senior Middle School Students (2005) it isclearly stated that students in senior middle school should be able to understand and useproper vocabulary to express different functions, intentions and attitudes, and to describebehaviors and concepts. However, during the vocabulary teaching process, there existmany problems. For example, a vast amount of teaching time is spent on explanationsabout the usage of the words, and students do not have enough time to chew and digestthem. Many students memorize new words only by reciting them again and againmechanically and gradually they lose interest in English. We are supposed to find moreeffective ways to solve these problems. On the basis of15-year vocabulary teachingexperience in senior middle school, the author thinks that attaching importance to contextin vocabulary teaching is a more effective way to teach senior middle school Englishvocabulary.Two questions are raised for the study. How can the notion of context be employedin senior middle school English vocabulary teaching? How effective is this context-basedapproach to senior middle school English vocabulary teaching?In the thesis the author introduces how to apply various contexts to senior middleschool English vocabulary teaching. Besides, the experimental methodology is adopted inthe study to obtain abundant data. Two surveys are conducted in the Experimental Classbefore and after the experiment. According to the result of the two surveys, it can be seenthat after the experiment, many students in the Experimental Class have changed theirattitudes towards vocabulary learning and become more and more interested in Englishvocabulary teaching. Moreover, most of them now can apply context to understanding andmemorizing new words. Also, the pretest and posttest are organized among84students ofthe two classes (Control Class and Experimental Class). Based on the data collection andanalysis, the author draws the conclusion that context-based approach to senior middle school English vocabulary teaching is really effective.Generally speaking, through the study the author hopes that English teachers in seniormiddle school can become more sensitive to various contexts and even create somecontexts while teaching vocabulary so as to enable students to get a deeper understandingof vocabulary learning, help them learn to make use of relative contexts to comprehend themeanings of vocabulary correctly and remember them more easily.