A Study Of The Effect Of Non-Linguistic Context On Senior High School Students' Vocabulary Learning

As is widely acknowledged,vocabulary is the most basic element of language,which is of vital importance for communication.Actually,people cannot get their meanings across without a certain amount of vocabulary.While an increasing number of English teachers attach great importance to vocabulary teaching,both the teachers and students get half the result with twice the efforts largely because of the monotonous vocabulary teaching method used by teachers and the negative attitude toward vocabulary learning held by students.Applying context to vocabulary teaching not only includes making sure the students master the pronunciations,the spellings and the meanings of the newly-learned words,but also requires teachers to encourage students to think actively and give full play to their initiative.Theoretically,context is made up of linguistic and non-linguistic contexts and the non-linguistic context is a complex system including all the material and spiritual factors.With the development of context theory,the application of linguistic context in high school English vocabulary teaching is widely accepted by English teacher s both at home and abroad.In spite of this,less attention has been paid to the non-linguistic context.This thesis aims to study the positive effect of non-linguistic context on students' attitudes,strategy and efficiency of English vocabulary learning in senior high schools,and to discover how to carry out vocabulary teaching under the guidance of non-linguistic context.Participants in this study,which lasts for one term,include 90 Grade 1 students from two classes in a senior high school in Wujiang,Suzhou.Vocabulary is introduced in non-linguistic context in the experimental group while traditional teaching method is adopted in the control group.The results of the study show that the current situation of senior high school students' vocabulary learning is not optimistic.Most students show no interest or confidence in it,and often show a negative attitude to it.More than half of them only recite words passively,resulting in low efficiency and inaccurate usage of language,which means the method adopted to learn the vocabulary should be improved or changed.After performing vocabulary teaching with the help of non-linguistic context,the experimental group has made significant progress and shown great improvement in students' learning strategy and confidence.In addition,the study reveals the positive effect of non-linguistic context on vocabulary teaching.Therefore it is necessary to teach new words in non-linguistic context in senior high schools.Based on the findings,teachers should be devoted to developing students' confidence in vocabulary learning as well as arousing students' interest and raising their awareness of non-linguistic context to make full use of students' initiative.