A Study Of Context-based English Vocabulary Teaching For Senior High Schools

Vocabulary teaching is an important part of senior high school English teaching. Since the release of National English Curriculum Standards for Common Senior High Schools in 2003, reform in vocabulary teaching has been made. However, there are still areas to be improved. Some students don’t have positive attitudes towards vocabulary learning and they don’t have a good mastery of effective meaning-guessing strategies or word-memorization strategies. The reasons for this might be that teachers have neither the awareness of the context related theories nor a good understanding as to how to design teaching activities efficient to improve students’ vocabulary learning by utilizing the features of context. The present study is an effort to explore the application of context theory to vocabulary teaching for senior high schools. It aims to explore the context-based vocabulary teaching and test whether it facilitates arousing students’ interest and emotion in vocabulary learning as well as improve their ability of guessing word meaning and memorizing vocabulary, consequently enhancing their overall language competence.This paper has a brief review of context theory and its development, the classifications and functions of context, analyzes the content and methods of vocabulary teaching researches, and summarizes principles governing how to apply context theory to vocabulary teaching. The five principles are diversification principle, authenticity principle, interest principle, deep-processing principle and frequency principle. Besides, actual teaching activity examples are provided.A teaching experiment is conducted in Mianyang Foreign Language School in Sichuan, with 64 senior high students as subjects, among which 32 are in the experimental class and the other in the control class. The experimental class was taught by adopting context-based teaching method, while in the control class a traditional method was used. The results from a questionnaire reveal that, as for the students in the experimental class, their attitude towards vocabulary learning and their behaviors in word-memorization and meaning-guessing process change. Meanwhile, the results from the tests also show that, in the experimental class, the students’ overall performance in the post-test was relatively better than the students’ in the control class. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the context-based vocabulary teaching method is helpful to develop the students’ positive attitude towards vocabulary learning, improve students’ meaning-guessing and word-memorization vocabulary learning strategies, consequently enhancing the development of students’ overall language ability.