Study On Pre-service English Teachers' Vocabulary Teaching In Terms Of What To Teach And How To Teach

Vocabulary is an indispensable section in language teaching. As one of the three elements of language vocabulary is the foundation of ESL teaching. After the generating of communicative approach in language teaching, vocabulary teaching takes the place of grammar teaching. Then, it becomes more and more important.Especially under the influence of English Curriculum Standards, the requirements of vocabulary teaching are comprehension and application of the words rather than that only focus on pronunciation and literal meaning. So, there are many teachers study about vocabulary teaching. They research vocabulary teaching from the perspective of cognitive psychology, cognitive linguists, cross-culture and so on. There is few research which learns about pre-service teachers' teaching level of vocabulary teaching. This thesis does an empirical study to analyze the different characteristics of pre-service teachers in order to find how the teachers really do to organize their English vocabulary teaching.The research dedicates to answering four questions as follow:1) What do the pre-service English teachers focus in vocabulary teaching concerning vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary size in the lessons of junior high school and senior high school respectively?2) What are the ways the pre-service English teachers prefer in vocabulary teaching concerning devotion of the time, design of activities, and choice of teaching approaches in the lessons of junior high school and senior high school respectively?3) What are the differences between junior high school vocabulary teaching and senior high school vocabulary teaching conducted by pre-service English teachers?4) What are the suggestions for the improvement of English vocabulary teaching?Therefore, the author carried out the study of 21 pre-service teachers who participate the finals of 2015 GuangXi Pre-service Teachers' Teaching Skill Contest.These pre-service teachers are selected from universities in Guang Xi who represent their colleges to join this contest. They might do much better in language teachingthan other pre-service teachers at some degree. They can represent the top level of pre-service teachers education in the universities of GuangXi. During the finals, they are divided into two groups, one group teaches a text of senior high school and the other teaches a text of junior high school. This thesis analyzes their teaching through classroom observation. The data are collected from the perspectives of what to teach and how to teach. The first aspect discusses the vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary size. The second aspect analyzes the devotion of the time, design of activities and choice of teaching approaches. Then, this thesis makes a comparison between teachers' lessons of senior high school and that of junior high school.Based on the investigation and analysis as well as observation this study have the following findings:First, from the aspect of what to teach the findings can be concluded as follow:1) The pre-service teachers are fully aware of the importance of vocabulary teaching in English lessons. They allocate much time to introduce and practice vocabularies2) During teaching vocabulary knowledge, their key points are introduce the form of the words. There is few teacher shows the collocation, connotation and appropriateness.Second, from the perspective of how to teach the findings can be divided into three points:3) Pre-service teachers prefer implicit teaching method in lessons of senior high school and other group of pre-service teachers prefer explicit teaching method in lessons of junior high school.4) Pre-service teachers allocate more time in vocabulary teaching lessons of junior high school than that of senior high school. At the same time, more vocabularies are taught in lessons of junior high school than that of senior high school.5) Kinds of activities are presented in the lessons of junior high school, but the activities are presented in single form in the lessons of senior high school.According to the major findings, there are several suggestions presented asfollow:1) The pre-service teachers should fully understand the content of vocabulary knowledge and pay much attention to the high level knowledge of vocabulary.2) They should carefully learn the requirements of New English Curriculum Standard, and learn to balance the time devoted to vocabulary teaching and that devoted to develop students' language skills as well as the teaching of other language knowledge.3) Memorize activities and strategy activities should be designed in the vocabulary lessons.4) Implicit teaching approach should be mastered by the pre-service teachers.This thesis observes 21 pre-service teachers' lessons of English vocabulary teaching in high school. The analysis of the data might represent the current teaching level of English pre-service teachers in GuangXi. The findings of this research have important significance for the development of English vocabulary teaching. However,because of some uncontrollable reasons, there are some limitations of this study. Great improvements are need for the research in the future.