A Study On The Application Of Culture Context In Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

It is widely accepted that vocabulary learning is important and difficult for most senior high school student in English learning.Many studies show that most students have great troubles in memorizing vocabulary which they have learned and they have little interest in it.In order to solve the mentioned problems above,the researcher firstly reviewed other scholars' studies on vocabulary teaching and then decided to apply cultural context to vocabulary teaching so as to verify whether it can enhance students' vocabulary memorization and can improve students' attitude towards English vocabulary learning.Therefore,the researcher proposed the following two research questions:(1)Can the application of cultural context in senior high school English vocabulary teaching enhance students' vocabulary memorization?(2)Can the application of cultural context in senior high school English vocabulary teaching improve students' attitude towards English vocabulary learning? In order to answer the two questions above,first of all,the researcher studied the development of cultural context.Then,the researcher adopted Hu Zhuanglin(2002)and Pei Wen's(2000)definitions of cultural context and incorporated them into teaching.In addition,the researcher reviewed the research on the application of cultural context in vocabulary teaching,summarized its advantages and disadvantages and applied cultural context to English vocabulary teaching from the angle of students' vocabulary memorization.The participants of the experiment come from the first senior high school of Min Xian in Gansu Province.The researcher chose class 5 in grade one as experimental class(EC)and class 8 in the same grade as control class(CC)and each of class held 49 students.Before the teaching experiment,the researcher used SPSS to analyze the two classes' scores of English final examination from last semester.The experimental class(EC)received 90.02 and the control class(CC)got 90.31(out of a total of 150),which indicated that the performance of the two classes had little difference.Moreover,the two classes were conducted questionnaires about students' attitude towards English vocabulary learning before the teaching experiment.Based on Vygotsky's learning theory of constructivism and Krashen's input hypothesis,the researcher applied cultural context to English vocabulary teaching in Class 5 for six weeks,and the whole experiment lasted for nine weeks.During that period,the control class was not used cultural context in English vocabulary.Teaching material was adopted from High School Curriculum Standard Textbook published by the People's Education Press.The teaching target words were chosen from the word lists of three units of Book Three.At the beginning of the teaching experiment,the researcher taughtvocabulary of unit one in both classes by using different methods.The teaching time was 30 minutes,and then the researcher used 10 minutes to do the immediate tests in both classes so as to see the effect of students' short-term memorization.The next week,the researcher still used 10 minutes to conduct the delayed tests in both classes on the vocabulary that they have learned so as to see the effect of students' long-term memorization.The vocabulary of the next two units were used the same method above.After finishing the teaching experiment,the researcher carried out the post-questionnaires to inquire students' attitude towards English vocabulary learning in both CC and EC.In addition,in order to testify students attitude towards vocabulary learning further after the experiment,ten students in EC were chosen to do an interview.After collecting all the data,the researcher used SPSS.22.0 to analyze the result of three immediate tests and three delayed tests,which showed that there was little difference between the three immediate tests of the two classes,but for the three delayed test results,the experimental class was significantly higher than the control class.In addition,the researcher also used SPSS.22.0 to make a comparative analysis of the results of the two classes' questionnaires before and after the experiment,finding that the attitude of students in EC towards vocabulary learning has significantly improved after the experiment.Finally,the researcher sorted and analyzed the interview answers and made a conclusion that most students in EC supported the application of cultural context in English and became positive in learning English vocabulary.Therefore,the researcher made a conclusion that the application of cultural context in senior high school English vocabulary teaching can enhance students' long-term memorization and can improve students' attitude towards vocabulary learning.