Teaching English Vocabulary From The Perspective Of Context In Senior High School

English vocabulary plays a significant role in English teaching and should therefore be taken seriously. Though traditional vocabulary teaching methods have a large number of problems, they are still used in English class. In order to have a good knowledge of vocabulary, students learn new words by rote mechanically, which creates the problem that students can’t use the words in a proper way. What’s more, traditional method can’t arouse students’interest in learning English, making vocabulary class dull and inefficient.Context is not only one of the most important concepts in pragmatics but also one of the key factors in using and understanding of language. With the help of vocabulary teaching based on contextualism, students will learn the meaning of words, form of words and usage of words as well contextually. Teaching English vocabulary in reference to context will ensure more students’ participation and it also avoids the teacher-centered vocabulary class. This thesis aims to apply contextualism to the English vocabulary teaching in middle schools. By calling attention to the importance of context in vocabulary learning, which has been neglected by and large, it attempts to contribute meaningfully and innovatively to English education in our schools..Guided by the principles of contextualism, we have designed a teaching experiment and have carried it out through classroom observations, questionnaires and the data analysis. This research project focuses on two main questions:(1) what is the present situation of applying contextualism to vocabulary teaching in China’s middle school;(2) Compared with traditional approaches to vocabulary teaching, whether context-focused vocabulary teaching can gain a better result.The data of questionnaire show that in most middle school, most teachers still use traditional vocabulary teaching methods in class, and few teachers teach new words within their contexts of usage. Following this discovery, the author has designed and conducted an experiment within a period of three months so as to find out the effect of contextualized vocabulary teaching. Two classes were taken as the experimental subjects. During the experiment, the experimental class used the contextualized vocabulary teaching, while the control class used the traditional vocabulary teaching. The results show conclusively that teaching vocabulary within context is more effective than traditional vocabulary teaching. Also, supported by the analysis of questionnaire, we can further conclude that the method vocabulary teaching within context is better able to arouse students’interest.By carrying out this research project, we hope that its results can shed some valuable light on the field of middle school vocabulary teaching.