A Case Study On Context-based English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is the foundation of English language learning,and its mastery directly affects learners' language competence.At the stage of senior high school,the role of English vocabulary teaching speaks for itself.The ways of teachers' demonstrating and practicing both affect students' ability to master and apply the vocabulary.This thesis aims at conducting a research on context-based vocabulary teaching among grade one English teachers in senior high school,which is in order to know whether these teachers make full use of context to help students learn and practice vocabulary.Questionnaire,classroom observation and interview are adopted in this thesis.The questionnaire sets the English teachers in senior one in this school as the target,which aims at collecting teachers' opinions on the concept of “context” as well as the method of “vocabulary teaching in context”;the classroom observation adopted in this thesis includes two forms,and they are classroom observation and classroom discourse transcription.The observation checklist records the teachers' vocabulary teaching in class through the author' s three-month practicum and the classroom discourse transcription acts as subjective complementary materials that help readers directly read the real vocabulary teaching conducted by those observed English teachers;besides,the interview is designed to know teachers' feelings when they teach vocabulary in context and some detailed reasons for certain problems.According to the result of the research,it is easy to find that most of the teachers have a good understanding of “context”,and they also have a reasonable cognition of the teaching belief “teaching vocabulary in context”.However,due to the limited time,heavy teaching burden and lack of systematic theory learning,the contexts adopted by teachers are unitary and far away from students' daily life to some extent.Taking this phenomenon into serious consideration,some suggestions are provided from three aspects,the presentation,the practice and the production of vocabulary,which are expected to improve vocabulary teaching.