An Experimental Study On Context-based Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

As a basic part of English language, vocabulary plays a significant role in English teaching in senior high school. It takes an essential position in the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Therefore, teachers should pay more attention to vocabulary teaching.With the development of the new curriculum reform, many kinds of teaching theories, approaches and models are studied by researchers and scholars. The context theory has raised concern in linguistic field in recent years, because it is a crucial part in improving lexical teaching. Even so, most English teachers still carry out vocabulary teaching regardless of contexts, and most senior high school students learn vocabulary by means of rote or repetition. The author tries to verify the effectiveness of combining lexical teaching with context theory in senior high school through experimental study in this paper.This experimental study included fifty six participants who came from two classes of Grade One of a senior high school. The author selected twenty eight students in each class as subjects. One of the classes was used as experimental class and the other one was control class. Before the teaching experiment, all the factors concerning students’ English learning showed only slight differences. The experimental study was done to find out answers to the following research questions:(1): How does the vocabulary teaching based on context increase students’ interest in vocabulary learning?(2): How does the vocabulary teaching based on context increase students’ competence of vocabulary learning?In order to deal with the research questions, nearly a three-month experiment was conducted. In EC, words were presented and consolidated based on context theory while the traditional vocabulary teaching method was still used in CC. Three months later, the data obtained from the questionnaires, two tests papers was collected and analyzed. The author found that the vocabulary teaching based on context theorycan improve students’ lexical learning interest and competence. Compared with CC students, EC students made great progress in strategies use in memorizing and guessing words. In addition, the author also found that the contextual vocabulary teaching approach is more effective than traditional method which could be reflected in the test scores. In conclusion, both students’ vocabulary learning interest and ability were improved when context theory was applied. At the end of the paper, the author pointed out the limitations of this study and put forward some suggestions on contextual vocabulary teaching.