A Study On Current Status And Strategies Of Teaching Word Power Section Of Advance With English Published By Yilin Press

The English textbook--Advance with English by Yilin Press has been widely used for seven years in every senior high school in Hunan province since September 2007. Word Power section in this textbook is the core part of English vocabulary teaching in senior high school, in which two kinds of words and expressions used to help students have a better command of vocabulary are presented. One is the words and expressions related to the topic of each unit, and the other refers to the introduced words and expressions transformed through specific word formation principles. In order to know about the current teaching status of Word Power section in senior high schools in our province, the author made a case study in Daoxian No.1 Middle School in Hunan province where she has been working, and investigated all the thirty-four English teachers. Through questionnaires, interviews and class observations, the author came to know that quite a number of teachers haven’t fully understood how to make good use of Word Power section to help students enlarge their vocabulary effectively and often ignore this section in their teaching so that it fails to help students further extend their vocabulary as expected. Specifically the main problems in the course of teaching this section are as follows: The teaching methods have been outdated and lack of novelty; teaching contents have not been rich; the unreasonable teaching design has been adopted and the teaching time has been shortened etc. In view of these problems, based on the Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis and the theories on input and output of second language acquisition and combined with the specific section of Word Power, the author put forward the corresponding improvement strategies: The modern teaching methods should be adopted primarily with a set of traditional teaching methods supplemented to improve the present teaching methods; the information in this section should be effectively exploited to enrich the teaching content in this section; the collective preparations for lessons among teachers should be strengthened to make the teaching design more reasonable and enough teaching time should be ensured. Finally, the author provided a concrete teaching design and teaching case for Word Power section.