A Study On Vocabulary Teaching Based On Dual Coding Theory In Primary School

Vocabulary is the building block of all languages.The exchange of thought is realized by the sentences which are composed by vocabularies.British linguist D.A.Wilkins proposed that “without grammar,very little can be conveyed;without words,nothing can be conveyed”.Vocabulary teaching is the basic unit and an important part in English teaching in primary schools.However,at present the vocabulary teaching is boring compared with other teaching because most teachers pay much attention to the speaking and reading rather than the ways of teaching vocabularies.The result is that students have trouble in memorizing and lose interest in English learning.Hence,how to stimulate students' learning interest and guarantee the long-term memory of the vocabularies has become the main issue to deal with in primary school English teaching.Dual Coding Theory(DCT)was first advocated by Paivio in 1969 and holds that people have two cognitive systems: verbal system and non-verbal system.At the beginning of this century,Dual Coding Theory caught attention by Chinese researchers and was applied in English Teaching.Guided by the Dual Coding Theory,this study attempts to apply DCT in the primary school,aiming to discuss these three questions:(1)What kind of influence did the vocabulary teaching based on the Dual Coding Theory have on students' memorizing vocabularies?(2)In what ways does English vocabulary teaching method based on DCT benefit for stimulating students' interest in English learning?(3)What kind of effects does vocabulary teaching based on DCT have on students' English scores?The author conducted the research in a primary school in Da Lian,involving 116 participants who are studying in Grade Six.The teaching experiment lasted for a whole semester,which included 58 pupils from control class(CC)and 58 pupils from experimental class(EC).English vocabulary teaching method based on the DCT was applied in the experimental class while control class adopts the traditional vocabulary teaching method.The research methods were literature review,experiment,interview and questionnaire.The data from the experiment was analyzed by the means of SPSS19.0.The research results showed that English vocabulary teaching method based on DCT could make students keep vocabularies in the mind for a longer time than before due to the corresponding images.It is beneficial for students to be interested in learning English in order to get higher scores.This study proves to be significant in that teachers ought to exploit more related images of vocabulary in teaching.What's more,teachers need to lead students to understand and form images in order to improve the efficiency of memorizing vocabularies.However,the author couldn'thave a deep understanding of the Dual Coding Theory and had trouble in teaching some abstract images.Therefore,these disadvantages are needed to be perfected in the future.