An Experimental Study Of Instruction Of English Association Mnemonic Vocabulary Strategies In Junior High School

As an important part of English teaching, vocabulary teaching is not only the focus concerned by an English teacher but also the most time-consuming part when students are learning English. However, most students memorize words mechanically. In particular, junior high school students have little knowledge of vocabulary learning strategies. As the national curriculum reform continues to deepen, how to efficiently develop vocabulary teaching, guide the students to use some related vocabulary memorizing strategies and improve students’ vocabulary learning efficiency is a research problem needed to be concerned by frontline teachers. In view of this, the author referred to lots of domestic and foreign experts’ researches on vocabulary learning strategy especially association memorizing strategy and conducted questionnaire survey of vocabulary association memorizing strategy among students the author taught. On this basis, the author carried out an 18-week targeted instruction for students of experimental class according to junior high school students’ memorizing characteristics.The present research attempts to explore the effects of vocabulary association memorizing strategy training on learners’ vocabulary learning performance and find effective ways to help junior school students to achieve good results in their vocabulary learning. This research takes a total of 70 junior three students from group 6 and group 7 in the Middle School Attached to Hebei Normal University as research objects. Group 6 is experimental group and Group 7 is control group. The researcher tries to carry out the training of association memorizing strategy according to context in classroom teaching activities, for the purpose of helping the students transform from short-term memory to meaningful long-term memory so that they can memorize accurately the words they have learnt. All the training covers selected vocabulary memorizing association strategy, which were trained during an 18-week project in the classes where the author was teaching. The instruments are one questionnaire and two vocabulary test papers related to association memorizing strategy. Data are collected and processed by means of statistic software SPSS.13.0. The author analyzes the effects of the instruction of the vocabulary association memorizing strategy on the junior high students’ vocabulary learning.Through the study, the author found that vocabulary learning strategies employed by junior high students are in the initial stage and it needs to be improved. One of the major factors that affect the students’ English achievements is the using of English vocabulary strategies. It is effective to get the vocabulary learning strategies instruction embedded into everyday classroom English teaching. There is a correlation between the vocabulary learning strategy and the students’ vocabulary learning efficiency. The study achievements witnessed great improvement through vocabulary learning strategy training.