An Experimental Study Of Word Formation In Vocabulary Learning In Senior High School

English, as one of the main international languages, sheds an obvious significance in many academic fields and intercultural communication contexts. Although English has been attached great importance in China’s elementary education, the phenomenon of time consuming with low efficiency still exists, for instance, the status and effect of English teaching are not very satisfactory. Qiu Jianhua(2005) generalizes that Chinese students have three major problems in vocabulary learning:(1) low ability of memorizing vocabulary;(2) serious pronunciation and spelling problems;(3) serious phonetic problems.To find answers to these problems, how to help students recognize, remember and learn to use vocabulary will be the biggest obstacles for English teachers. All students realize the significance of the vocabulary in English. However, due to the lack of scientific and effective method of learning, learning to use vocabulary appropriately becomes an insurmountable barrier for most of them. Therefore, the author wants to carry out a research in word learning theories related to teaching, and in word formation techniques related to learning. By doing so, the author expects to cultivate students to guess the meaning by word formation skills, to expand students’ vocabulary effectively, and to achieve a better language learning results.The present research is undertaken to test the effectiveness of word formation in vocabulary learning in senior high school. The following questions will be addressed in the process:a) What are the difficulties that students encounter in vocabulary learning?b) What are the means that the teachers apply in the process of vocabularyteaching?c) What effects does word formation have on vocabulary learning?In this research, 105 students from Qingdao NO.39 Middle School, Shandong province participate as subjects. During the experiment, the Class Three, Grade Two of senior high school is the control class which the author applies the ordinary method in teaching vocabulary. Class Four is the experiment class which the author teaches with word formation techniques guided by language acquisition theories.The author employed the SPSS 17.0 software to analyze the experimental data. The experimental results show that:a) The biggest problems that students encountered in vocabulary learning werethey could not remember words and it was difficult for them to use wordsappropriately.b) More than half teachers would like to adopt the word formation techniques intheir vocabulary teaching. Most English teachers prefer ordinary method invocabulary teaching.c) Word formation techniques could be more effective in promoting students’vocabulary learning.