A Study On English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School From A Socio-cultural Perspective

Nowadays, it is normal that English teachers pay more attention to implanting the knowledge in the English vocabulary class. Thus, the learners are starved of the learning enthusiasm. Besides, some English teachers neglect the importance of the English vocabulary in their English classes. On the contrary, they only notice the English knowledge, in which way leads to the single teaching methods and boring atmosphere of the class. In this way, some learners who are not interested in the English teaching hate English, even get the lower grades, especially for English vocabulary. It influences the quality of English teaching to a great extent. The class phenomenon is in need of changing immediately. In an English class, we need the cooperation between the teacher and learners to make efforts together.This thesis aims to study the English vocabulary teaching in senior high school. The author chooses the two classes in the No.1 middle school in Gaizhou of Liaoning to make the experiment, collects the data through the questionnaire and vocabulary tests, and also uses the SPSS and Likert Scale to analyze these data, in order to discuss the function of the teachers’ methods in the English vocabulary teaching. The focus of the study is on teachers’ teaching methods to improve the learners’ vocabulary learning ability, so the author adopts three important concepts on the Socio-cultural Theory to analyze, namely the Mediation, the Zone of Proximal Development and the Scaffolding. The results of analysis and discussion show that it is advisable to analyze the English vocabulary teaching from the Socio-cultural Theory.This thesis is comprised up of five chapters. There appears the research background, the research significance and purpose in Chapter One. Chapter Two introduces the key terms related to the theoretical basis and the relative researches both at home and abroad. Chapter Three reports the experiment of the research, including the introduction of the subjects and purpose of the research, research questions, research instruments and procedures, even the data collection. Chapter Four analyzes the collected data and discusses the results after the experiment, and gives some suggestions to the English vocabulary teaching. The last part is Chapter Five, which concludes the major findings of this research, the limitations of the paper and some suggestions for further study.Based on the results of this thesis, this thesis concludes that applying the Socio-cultural Theory into English vocabulary teaching in senior high school can arouse learners’ learning enthusiasm and reduce the anxiety of English tests. Therefore, the objective is achieved to improve learners’ comprehensive ability of language application eventually.