An Application Of Association Strategy To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Vocabulary learning is of great essence in second language acquisition and is also closely connected with the development of language skills.Presently,most students consider vocabulary learning as a time-consuming language learning process.They memorize words mechanically,which results in the low efficiency of their vocabulary leaning and the loss of their enthusiasm of English learning.In order to improve students' vocabulary learning efficiency and raise their learning interest,nowadays myriads of researchers have been studying a variety of vocabulary learning strategies.Association strategy is a kind of vocabulary learning strategy to help language learners to memorize the information more easily by making use of the identical or similar features of the new words and the old words as activation factors.A lot of researchers at home and abroad have studied association strategy.And more emphasis has been put on the researches of college students and senior high school students.Hence,few studies have been conducted on the junior high students.What's more,most of the studies have focused on the classification of association strategy.Very little attention has been paid to the detailed introduction of the specific classification.To fulfill the gaps above,this study aims at applying association strategy to junior high students' English vocabulary learning in No.1 Junior High School of the Economic Development Zone in Fuyang City of Anhui Province.In this study,association strategy is classified into three categories: phonological association,morphological association and semantic association.In light of the language proficiency of the junior high school students,semantic association is taken as the focus.There are totally 99 students from two classes in Grade 8 participating in this experiment.Class 5 is taken as the control class,and Class 6 is the experimental class.In this experiment,the author checks the students' vocabulary breadth and depth through the pre-test firstly.Then she concludes a survey to know students' current vocabulary learning situation by the pre-questionnaire and the interview.After the experiment,the author makes a comprehensive survey of association strategy in the experimental class by the post-questionnaire.Finally,students' vocabulary breadth and depth have been checked by the post-test.The research instruments mentioned above are used to probe into the following three research questions:Question 1: What is the current situation of students' English vocabulary learning in Grade 8 of Junior High School?Question 2: What is the influence of association strategy on students' vocabulary learning interest?Question 3: What is the influence of association strategy on students' vocabulary breadth and depth?After the experiment,all the questionnaires,interview and vocabulary tests have been collected and analyzed through quantitative and qualitative methods,which provide us with clear answers to the above three research questions:(1)First,many junior high school students in Grade 8 haven't realized the importance of vocabulary learning.And most of them are not interested in vocabulary because they are short of effective vocabulary learning strategies.(2)Second,association strategy can raise student's vocabulary learning interest.(3)Third,association strategy cannot promote students' vocabulary breadth and depth significantly.Generally speaking,the experiment is a little fruitful,but it's not successful to some extent as the third research question cannot be answered after the experiment.Through the researcher's comprehensive reflection,some problems and limitations in this study have been found,which remain to be solved and perfected by promoting the objective conditions and improving the researcher's teaching abilities.