An Action Research On Improvement In Vocabulary Learning Of Junior Middle School Under The Guidance Of English Vocabulary Teaching Strategies

Adequate vocabulary is a key to master English, and the proficiency of the language also relies on the size of the vocabulary. The process of increasing vocabulary is done through memorizing and putting them into use.Accordingly, it is very important to adopt the efficient approach to teach how to learn vocabulary and basically facilitate students’ memory of vocabulary; otherwise not only teacher and students’ efforts are not rewarding, but students may also lose confidence in learning English. Therefore the author has brought up the issue to develop a strategy-oriented learning and memorizing approach to help students to learn vocabulary more efficiently.The present thesis studies the vocabulary teaching with strategies of learning and memorizing for middle school students under the guidance of vocabulary strategies.In this six week action research, the participants were 50 students in Grade 3 in Guiyang No.16 Middle School. The author adopted a questionnaire investigation to identify the students’ learning problems and designed an action research on vocabulary-strategy-orientated teaching. The teaching planning was adjusted to have better effects with the help of the students’ feed backs,, interview, teaching journal and teacher’s reflection.. In the process, the author analyzed vocabulary in elements like context, word-formation, synonym, antonym,etc. to help students to link new vocabulary to known vocabulary, and under the guidance of Ebbinghaus curve to help students to strengthen their vocabulary memory.The results showed that students have achieved good vocabulary learning resultsusing learning strategies. The students better at English use vocabulary learning strategies more willingand actively and their vocabulary is relatively large; the students with large vocabulary are much better at using vocabulary learning strategies actively. The action research also gives the author some implications, i.e. students’ memorizing words should not be simply by rote learning, memorizing words aimlessly, but under the guidance of learning strategy, through the root, prefix, suffixof word-formation enlarge vocabulary knowledge.And at the same time, vocabulary learning is dependent on the context, and should be performed in the context of vocabulary learning.The thesis suggests in English teaching, teachers should pay attention to guiding students how to memorize words, help students to use different learning strategies to promote vocabulary acquisition.And teachers should give different instructionfor learning strategy according to students’ individual differences, so that the students can find suitable strategies for their own.At the same time, if teachers, in vocabulary teaching, especially in review of vocabulary, simply follow English-Chinese translation, that may mislead the students to learn words in the only way of finding equivalence between English and Chinese.The issue at the present is that a teacher’s ability needs improving so as to teach in contextualized vocabulary as part of professional development.