On The Application Of Semantic Network To Junior English Vocabulary Revision Teaching

Vocabulary is a fundamental component in the process of learning a foreign language, and it is equally important for English learning. A solid foundation of vocabulary plays an important role at every stage of learning English, especially, junior high school students are in a critical learning stage for vocabulary cultivation. Yet, quite a lot of junior high school students have difficulties in learning vocabulary and they usually cannot do well in vocabulary memorization and vocabulary application. To some extent, students have a lack of regular revision after learning new vocabulary, which may lead to the vocabulary learning problems. As a result, the effective method should be applied to vocabulary revision teaching to help students improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning. Therefore, vocabulary revision teaching as a step of vocabulary teaching should be greatly valued. However, the traditional teaching method is still adopted by most of teachers in vocabulary revision lessons, and students always use rote learning with words list to review vocabulary, thus, students have lost motivation and interest in learning vocabulary. Nevertheless, the effective methods for vocabulary revision teaching have been rarely explored in the past. According to the current vocabulary learning situation in junior high school and students’ cognitive characteristics, the semantic network is particularly presented and explored for vocabulary revision teaching in this thesis. Because knowledge in semantic network is presented through the associative elements, the semantic network applied to vocabulary revision can convey the close associations between newly acquired vocabulary and to-be-learned vocabulary. It can also make a summarization of the same classified vocabulary. Thus, students can become moreflexible with less mechanical tasks. It should be pointed out that vocabulary revision teachingin this research is organized and carried out at the end of each unit teaching. That is to say, avocabulary revision lesson has been arranged after finishing presenting new knowledge ofeach unit, during which the semantic network has been applied to vocabulary revision for thisunit in a systematic way.This thesis mainly aims to explore the specific research questions:1. Can the semantic network function better than traditional teaching method?2. Can the application of vocabulary semantic network benefit students in vocabularymemorization and application?3. Can semantic network method make students become more active in vocabularylearning?The experiment was carried out in Taiyuan Wanbailin No.11junior high school, andqualitative and quantitative methods were combined to analyze the experiment results. Theresearch instruments contained vocabulary tests, questionnaire and interview. The datacollected from experiment results was entered into SPSS17.0for statistical analysis. Theexperiment was carried out in two parallel classes, one was considered as experimental class,the other was control class, and each class contained43students. The experiment wasaccordingly carried out after conducting the same vocabulary pre-test in both classes whichaimed to guarantee the equal vocabulary proficiency between two classes before experiment.The experimental class was introduced to use the semantic network method in vocabularyrevision teaching while the control class was still instructed with the traditional teachingmethod. The vocabulary post-test was simultaneously conducted in both classes when theexperiment came to an end and there was a significant difference of vocabulary proficiencybetween two classes. The questionnaire aimed to examine experimental subjects’ motivationand interest after the application of semantic network. And the interview as a furtherquantitative analysis was conducted only in experimental class so as to consider students’opinions and evaluation of semantic network applied to unit vocabulary revision. Accordingto the whole analysis of the research results, this thesis has indicated that:1. The semantic network can function better than traditional teaching method. 2. The application of vocabulary semantic network can benefit students in vocabularymemorization and application.3. The semantic network method can make students become more active in vocabularylearning.In brief, this thesis has put forward the application of semantic network method to thejunior English vocabulary revision teaching, and the author hopes that the main findings ofthis paper can give significant suggestions and inspiration to teachers and students in teachingand learning vocabulary, indeed, there exists some research limitations in this paper, so someweaknesses and advice are expected to be pointed out, and also hopes that more furtherrelevant researches can be studied in the future.