An Experimental Research On Picture-book-assisted English Vocabulary Teaching At Primary School

As stated in The English Curriculum for Chinese Primary School and Junior/Senior Middle School 2011 that vocabulary teaching is the core of English teaching in lower grades at primary school.In Guangzhou,standards of English learning are even higher for pupils.However,the recent vocabulary teaching in English class at primary schools is far from satisfaction.If pupils have no effective English learning strategies,especially the vocabulary learning strategy,they might get bored easily and fail in their English learning as they try to memorize the words by repeating them mechanically.With all its advantages,picture books can be used as vehicles and phonics can be applied to instruct pupils' vocabulary learning,the combination might help improve English vocabulary teaching at primary schools.Based on John Dewey's Interest Education Thoughts,Krashen's Language Input Hypothesis and Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory,this study is to verify if picture-book-assisted English vocabulary teaching can improve pupils' vocabulary learning efficiency,especially vocabulary memorization and learning interest.Before the experiment,literature study and questionnaires were adopted in this research.83 pupils from 2 classes in Grade Three from KML Primary School participated in the20-week experiment,and these two classes were divided into the experimental class and the control class.Pupils were analyzed and evaluated by pre-test,post-tests,pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire as well as an interview.In the experiment,target words were taught with English picture books in the EG and with separate pictures in the CG.There was an immediate post-test after each picture book lesson and a delayed post-test one week later with the same test questions.Then a summative delayed post-test was conducted when all the ten experimental lessons were completed.Also,there was a post-test in the end of the experiment as the counterpart of the pre-test.All the post-tests were to verify pupils' vocabulary learning efficiency.After that,a post-questionnaire was conducted in the EG as to verify the changes of pupils' learning interest.Lastly,three pupils were interviewed after the post-test,they were a top student,an average student and a student with learning difficulty.All data were processed by SPSS 19.0.The data of the tests were analyzed with Independent Samples T-test.Questionnaires were analyzed with percentage method and the interviews were presented asinterview scripts.According to the results of the Independent Samples T-test,there is a significant difference between the EG and CG in the summative post-test,which indicates that picture-book-assisted English vocabulary teaching can help improve pupils' vocabulary learning.However,the results of the Independent Samples T-test of the post-test shows no significant difference.And the post-questionnaire shows pupils' English learning interest and learning strategies improved during the experiment.We may draw the conclusions from the analysis as follows: 1)It is clear that picture-book-assisted English vocabulary teaching can help pupils memorize target words better;2)Picture books can increase pupils' interest in learning English vocabulary;3)Pupils need more time and more training so as to transfer the vocabulary learning strategies acquired in the experimental lessons to their regular English learning.