An Empirical Study Of English Paraphrase In High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary,as one of the three elements of language,is essential in verbal communication.Without vocabulary,there is no English learning at all.However,there are many problems in English vocabulary teaching nowadays.Most of English teachers just use the vocabulary list to teach students English vocabulary.The problem of such a teaching method is that students memorize vocabulary mechanically.Besides,they tend to develop a habit of learning English words only through their corresponding Chinese meanings,which leads to the negative transfer of Chinese on English vocabulary learning.As a result,although students can memorize the vocabulary quickly,they forget it quickly as well.This paper,based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and D.P.Au Subel’s Meaningful Learning,with the use of both qualitative research and quantitative research,aims at learning about the following two questions:1.By teaching English vocabulary with Paraphrase-based method,can it help students learn vocabulary correctly and distinguish words with similar meaning?2.Can Paraphrase-based method help students improve their vocabulary test scores compared with vocabulary list teaching?This paper,selected two parallel class in No.1 Middle School in Yu Lin as the research subjects.One of the class is experimental class,which adopt paraphrase-based method in English vocabulary teaching;the other one is control class,which adopt traditional vocabulary list in English vocabulary teaching.After one semester,the author analyses the result of questionnaire,experiment and interview respectively.The final result shows that after one semester’s teaching vocabulary with Paraphrase-based method,students’ vocabulary test result in the experimental class is much better than that in the control class,especially in synonyms discrimination.That is to say,teaching vocabulary with Paraphrase-based method can help students learn the words correctly and distinguish words with similar meaning.It can also help students improve their learning efficiency of words and their interests of vocabulary learning.Teaching vocabulary with Paraphrase-based method can help students develop the habit of thinking in English and enlarge their vocabulary.The author hopes that this research can have some benefits to English vocabulary teaching in high schools.