The Application Of Context Theories In English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior Middle School

As is known to all, vocabulary is the most important one of the three major components that constitute English language and it is the foundation of any kind of communication. No matter how good one’s grammar is, if he doesn’t have enough vocabulary to express his own feelings or to understand other’s opinions, he can still not communicate’ with others in this language. However, vocabulary learning is the most difficult task in the study of foreign language. It is, therefore, especially important to study vocabulary learning strategies and its teaching methods.Meanwhile, the same English words may have different meanings in different contexts, for the same word may bear different associative meanings. Therefore, contexts play an important role in interpreting and restricting the meaning of words and the teaching and learning of English vocabulary cannot be detached from contexts. As approaches of English vocabulary teaching, context theories are being adopted by more and more English teachers. While the context is the key to teaching vocabulary, a word meaning is from its context environment to support and help, without context, the meaning of words can not determine the specific meaning. In recent years, some scholars and English teachers have engaged in studying the application of context theory in English vocabulary teaching. However, most of them focus on the application of context theories in college English or senior middle school English. The researches on applying context theories in junior middle school, a very foundational stage, are paid less attention to.For these reasons, the purpose of this thesis is to improve students’vocabulary learning by applying context theories to English vocabulary teaching in junior middle school. Eighty students from Class6and Class7Grade eight of Ma Yang Middle School in Tian Men are chose to be the subjects. All the students take part in the pre-experiment test. The results of the pretest show that there is no significant difference between the two classes in vocabulary learning before the experimental teaching. In the process of the experiment, the experiment class was taught by the researcher with the new method----teaching vocabulary in context, while the control group received the traditional method. Questionnaires, pre-test and post-test were adopted to compare and measure the two groups. Various methods will used to collect, sort and analyze the data. The author of this thesis mainly studies the vocabulary teaching of junior middle school, the study employs an experiment which lasted a semester, the following two hypotheses were examined:(1) whether teaching vocabulary in context in middle school can improve students’ enthusiasm in vocabulary learning;(2) whether teaching vocabulary in context in middle school can better students’competence of vocabulary application.The results of the experiment indicate that the average score and passing rate of the experiment class in which vocabularies are taught through context-based approach is much higher than those of the control class. What’s more, the students’ performance in the experiment class was more active in class. The author, therefore, discovers that learning vocabulary in context is more helpful to middle school learners in improving their vocabulary application. Moreover, it can improve the students’interest in vocabulary learning and has a positive effect on developing their vocabulary learning strategy. Therefore, we can conclude that the hypotheses has been proved that teaching vocabulary in context not only can improve students’ enthusiasm in vocabulary learning, but also can develop students’ competence of vocabulary application. To sum up, vocabulary teaching in the middle school should be integrated with the context. The results of the experiment indicate that the application of context theories to English vocabulary teaching in junior middle school is effective and feasible.