A Study On The Application Of Association Strategy In English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Vocabulary is important in the process of learning English. As Wilkins(1972) once put it, “Without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.” Vocabulary influences every part in English. However, many students have trouble in learning words. Therefore, it is necessary to teach them some strategies to remember them longer. Through reading a lot of international relative literature, the author summarize some vocabulary association strategies.The origin of association dated back to 2000 years ago. Plato thought that memory is a kind of association. Aristotle raised three laws in association, which are similarity, comparison and closing to nature. The earliest research about vocabulary association strategy can be dated back to 19 th century. Some psychologists became interested in word association and started to study vocabulary association. And then vocabulary association strategy got more attention from linguistics, such as, Kent, Miller, Cook, etc.To improve word learning effects and help students learn words better and acquire word learning strategies, the author conducted a four- month action research to teach 70 students from two classes in No.139 junior high school of Shenyang. One class is experimental class(EC) and the other is control class(CC). The EC is taught with word association strategy, and the CC is taught by the traditional teaching method.The research includes the following two questions:(1) Can association strategy vocabulary teaching and learning strategy facilitate students’ English vocabulary learning scores?(2) Is the association strategy more effective in enhancing the students’ interests in English vocabulary learning?The study includes five chapters. Chapter One introduces the research’s background, the significance and goal of the study. Chapter Two is Literature Review. It makes up of four parts: word association strategy, theoretical basis, vocabulary learning strategy, the application of association strategy to vocabulary teaching in China and Abroad. Chapter Three is methodology. This Chapter presents the research questions, the procedures of the experiment, some assistant materials in the research and data analysis. Chapter Four states the results of the experiment and discussed them. Chapter Five is peroration: the major implication of the study, suggestions and limitations for future study.During this research, compared with the traditional vocabulary teaching method, we can see that word association strategy is able to improve the students’ English vocabulary learning scores more effectively. Word association strategy can motivate the students’ English vocabulary learning interest.