An Application Of Semantic Field Theory In English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

We all know that vocabulary is one of the basic elements in a language. And it is of great value in students’ English learning. There will be no sentence, no text and no language without the proper use of vocabulary. Nowadays, more and more people have gradually realized the importance of vocabulary knowledge.In China, teachers from junior high school have already realized the significance of vocabulary instruction. But because of lacking proper guidance and effective approach, teachers from junior high school ignore the interrelationships among words and still pay more attention to the mechanical repetition, which is considered to be low-effective and time-consuming. Therefore, the author of this thesis applied semantic field theory to the English vocabulary teaching in junior high school by way of constructing different semantic field according to the different semantic relations(i.e. hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy, collocation). The approach based on semantic field theory was adopted with the purpose of solving longstanding problems of traditional vocabulary teaching approach and guiding the teaching practices.In order to test the effectiveness of the teaching approach based on semantic field theory, an experiment was conducted and 85 students from Binhai Junior High School in Jinzhou are chosen as the subjects. Two parallel classes which contain 85 students are divided into control class(CC) and experimental class(EG) by random. EC with 43 students is taught by the use of the approach based on semantic field theory. CC with 42 students is taught by the use of traditional method. Both the two classes are taught by the same teacher with the same teaching material. The experiment is conducted from September, 2015 to January, 2016 which lasted 16 weeks. Four tests are conducted before and after the experiment, and a questionnaire and an interview are also conducted in the end. Three research questions are proposed in this thesis. 1) What are students’ attitudes toward the teaching approach based on semantic field theory? 2) Can the teaching approach based on semantic field theory facilitate the depth of vocabulary knowledge? 3) Can the teaching approach based on semantic field theory promote students’ vocabulary proficiency?Both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis were employed in this thesis. After data collection and data calculation with SPSS, the following conclusions were reached: 1)From the answers of the questionnaire and the interview, we can tell that almost all the students in the experimental group agreed that the teaching approach based on semantic field theory is more effective than the traditional teaching approach. 2) The result of the vocabulary knowledge scale shows that the experimental group did a better job compared with the control group. We can also say that the teaching approach based on semantic field theory can facilitate students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge. 3) After the experiment, the experimental group performed better than the control group. Thus, we can draw a conclusion that the teaching approach based on semantic field theory can promote students’ vocabulary proficiency.