A Study Of The Effects Of Schema-based Vocabulary Teaching On Chinese Senior High School Students' English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary is the most important part of language knowledge,and also the basis of development of listening,speaking,reading and writing skills.If the students don't pay enough attention to vocabulary,they will fail in other aspects,and this strongly proves the significance and influence of vocabulary learning.Recently,the vocabulary requirement of college entrance examination has risen year by year,and vocabulary becomes the stumbling block of getting high marks in the English tests.Most of the students master vocabulary by rote memory,which is inefficient.The lack of vocabulary hinders their improvements of listening,speaking,reading,writing and other comprehensive language abilities.Against such a background,it is a must for an English teacher to study effective vocabulary teaching methods.As an age-old saying goes,“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”,only by cultivating students' learning strategies can we help them master learning,develop independent learning ability,and finally become the real masters of learning.Among all the studies on the relationship between schema theory and the second language learning in China,more studies are about applying schema theory to the teaching of reading and writing,and not many about the application of schema theory in vocabulary teaching.Therefore,this situation also gives the important theoretical significance of this study.This study tries to apply schema theory to English vocabulary teaching in senior high school,which focuses on some special topics to activate old words,expand new vocabulary and finally build a lexical network with the intention of helping students to form effective vocabulary learning strategies.Meanwhile,it also makes students more interested in learning vocabulary,decrease the difficulty of learning vocabulary,arouse their enthusiasm of learning vocabulary,make them get involved actively and finally better learn effects.There are two research questions in this study:(1)Is the schema-based vocabulary teaching conducive to Chinese senior high school students' English vocabulary learning?(2)Are there any differences in the effects of schema-based vocabulary teaching on English vocabulary learning among senior high school students of varied proficiency levels?In order to conduct the research,I did an experiment of which the subjects were two parallel classes in Senior One taught by myself.A pre-test and a post-test were organized in those two classes and a questionnaire was done by the students in experimental class.The relevant data of the experiment and the questionnaire were analyzed by using SPSS18.0statistical software.After the experiment,significant improvement has been found in the experimental class which adopted schema-based vocabulary teaching compared to the control class which used traditional vocabulary teaching.From the result of the questionnaire of the students in the experimental class,I conclude that the experimental class can use derivatives,synthesis method to help the memory of words,identify many roots and affixes,memorize vocabulary according to the theme,expand other related words,use context,semantic features,fixed collocation or association with their related experiences to help consolidate the words.The study confirms that vocabulary teaching based on schema theory not only improves senior high school students' vocabulary performance,but it also helps students to form effective vocabulary learning strategies.However,there are differences in the effects of schema-based vocabulary teaching on English vocabulary learning among students of varied proficiency levels.Students with high scores in the pre-test made greater progress while students with low scores made almost no progress.The study has further confirmed the important role of schema in English vocabulary learning.As English teachers,we should strive to explore the vocabulary teaching methods based on schema theory to help students improve their vocabulary learning and form effective vocabulary learning strategies.