An Investigation Into Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge Of Senior High School Students

Since 1980 s,vocabulary,as an important part of the language structure,has been paid more and more attention by language researchers and learners.In the study of English learners' breadth of vocabulary knowledge,researchers and English teachers gradually shift their research focus to learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge.More and more researchers have realized that vocabulary acquisition is not a simple "not acquired" or "acquired" affair,but a gradual process of vocabulary knowledge accumulation.The study of learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge does not study how many words the students have learned,but how much they have learned about one word.In order to know the acquisition of Chinese senior high school students' mastery of depth of vocabulary knowledge,the author,through an empirical study,investigates the overall situation of senior high school students' depth of vocabulary knowledge in practical teaching and its correlation with English achievement.117 senior middle school students of a high school from one science intact class and arts intact class took part in the investigation by finishing test paper.It includes the examination of the synonyms and collocations of high frequency words.The intention is to better know the situation of vocabulary teaching in high school at the present stage.The research tools include two parts: the Mid-term examination and vocabulary depth knowledge test.After these two tests,the author collected and analyzed all the statistics by using SPSS.Then descriptive statistics,separate t-tests and Pearson correlation analysis were adopted to investigate the research questions.After the study,the author came up with the following findings:(1)Generally speaking,the participants' mastery of depth of vocabulary knowledge of high-frequency words is far from satisfactory.Less than half of the participants had reached the level of passing or above.Compared to collocationknowledge,students have a better mastery of synonym knowledge.(2)Arts students have better grasp of depth of vocabulary knowledge than science students,but there is no significant difference between arts students and science students in depth of vocabulary knowledge.(3)There is a significant correlation among different aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge.The mastery of one aspect of depth vocabulary will affect the learning of other aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge.Moreover,there is a significant correlation between the depth of vocabulary knowledge and the English performance,of which the synonym knowledge have a positively significant correlation with the English performance.It can be concluded from the above findings: first,most of the students ignore the learning of depth of vocabulary knowledge of high frequency words,the overall level of their grasp of these is low.Second,the arts and science students have no significant differences in the depth of vocabulary knowledge.Third,the depth of vocabulary knowledge will affect students' English performance.Finally,based on these findings,this paper puts forward a series of suggestions to transform teachers' and students' English vocabulary learning beliefs,improve English vocabulary teaching contents and teaching methods,and how to enhance students' acquisition of depth of vocabulary knowledge.The study of the relationship between the depth of vocabulary knowledge and English performance plays a certain role in the teaching and learning of vocabulary,which confirms the importance of acquisition of depth of vocabulary knowledge in the process of second language acquisition.It is proposed that high school students should pay attention to the accumulation of their depth of vocabulary knowledge in order to improve their English learning efficiency.