The Application Of Summary Writing In Senior High School Vocabulary Teaching And Learning

Vocabulary learning has attracted great attention in English learning in decades. It is widely recognized that vocabulary is the fundamental unit of learning English, including listening, speaking, reading and writing. Without certain storage of vocabulary, no one could understand and acquire English. The importance of vocabulary learning has proved to be true. So how to help students learn vocabulary has been brought to the focus of English teaching. Most students are inclined to “learn” vocabulary by memorizing the words as well as their corresponding Chinese meaning, which shows they simply remember the words mechanically but not really learn the words. When they come across the word somewhere next time, they probably will forget its meaning because they try to remember the words alone previously, that is to say, students learn the words without a context. It puts students in a position where they think they have already learn the words by knowing its mere meaning but actually they still have trouble in using the words in proper context.To mitigate that serious situation, this dissertation has come up to focus on an effective but convenient way to help students learn the words in a certain context- the summary writing. A five-month long empirical experiment was carried out in order to testify the effectiveness between the summary writing and vocabulary learning. This experiment was conducted at two Grade 1 classes in Tai Shun Yu Cai Senor High School. Class 1 is the experimental class and class 2 is the control class. Students from the experimental class received the exercise of summary writing for six months while students from the control class did not have this task. The experiment proceeded into four stages and in each stage specially designed summary sheets based on the reading text in their textbook were handed out for students to complete. Meanwhile, during this long procedure, the whole examination results of EC and CC were collected so as to analyze the difference between them with the aid of SPSS 16.0.The following research questions were formulated for the purpose of the present study: Q1: To what extent will summary writing improve students’ vocabulary learning? Q2: In what aspects will summary writing help students improve vocabulary ability? Q3: What are the achievement differences in different level of students in summary writing?Through the empirical study of summary writing, the following conclusions are drawn in correspondence with the three research questions:The summary writing could provide students with a certain context to learn vocabulary. The results of each examination show that students in EC have a better command of vocabulary than CC, which proves that summary writing can improve students’ vocabulary learning ability.Through the analysis of students’ summary writing and their examination paper results, the summary writing helps students learn to change the form of the words, considering the transformation and derivation of the words. What’s more, it is useful for students’ long-term memory of the words through the summary writing of the reading texts.Based on analysis of summary writing, the high-level students are best at interpreting the words in the text so they have good skill of using the new words in the right context with few grammatical mistakes in summary writing. While the middle level students could mostly analyze the new words in reading text and apply them in right context in their summary writing, but they have trouble with some difficult words. As for the low-level students, they could recognize the new words and expressions in the reading text. However, it is more difficult for them to use them in the right context in a right form.