An Empirical Study On College English Vocabulary Teaching Under The Cultural Context

Vocabulary is the fundamental component of language.For second language teaching,vocabulary teaching is an essential part of it.The learners of English language ought to recourse to the intra-linguistic context and the extra-linguistic context so as to understand the meaning of English words and expression accurately.The extra-language context is an extremely comprehensive system that consists of every spiritual and material factor,in which cultural context factors are of paramount importance.The thesis takes the English majors of Grade Two from Hunan Institute of Science and Technology(HNIST)as the subjects,aiming to explore the effect of vocabulary teaching based on cultural context theory on students' vocabulary learning attitudes and strategies,vocabulary memory and vocabulary abilities at different levels.The study aims to promote the application of cultural context in college English vocabulary teaching in order to improve students' ability of vocabulary comprehension and use.The subjects were college English majors in Grade Two with similar levels from two classes,which are treated as the experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC).From the aspect of empirical study,the thesis discusses the following threequestions by means of questionnaire,interview and cultural vocabulary tests:(1)What are the effects of college English vocabulary teaching based on cultural context theory on students' vocabulary learning attitudes and strategies?(2)What are the effects of college English vocabulary teaching based on cultural context theory on students' vocabulary short term and long term memory?(3)What are the effects of college English vocabulary teaching based on cultural context theory on students' vocabulary abilities at different levels?There are some major findings of the research as follows:In the questionnaire and interview,the difference between the EC and the CC is very obvious.After the experiment,students from the EC focus more on the context of vocabulary including cultural context,vocabulary learning strategies have been greatly enhanced,and their academic performance has improved significantly.It can be seen that the vocabulary teaching method in the cultural context is superior as it enables students to be more interested in vocabulary learning and enhance their strategies in learning and abilities to do exercises and the tests.From the pre-test,post-test and the delayed post-test of cultural context vocabulary test,it can be seen that college English vocabularyteaching based on cultural context theory has a positive influence on students' vocabulary memory including short term memory and long term memory,which indicates that it can greatly improve students' vocabulary memory.From the data of students' scores in different groups,it can be seen that the college English vocabulary teaching based on cultural context theory has a certain positive influence on students at all levels but there are some differences respectively.This teaching method has the greatest positive influence on average level students while it has a few positive effects on the low level students and has almost few influences on excellent students.Finally,some suggestions are put forward for the cultural context teaching.The author hopes that this study can play a certain positive role in further teaching.Of course,there are also deficiencies in the thesis,for instance,the number of samples in the study does not represent all English majors or college students of other majors.The teaching hours were limited,which may lead to the fact that students' changes cannot fully prove the results of the experiment,and the classification of vocabulary in the cultural context also has a lot of shortcomings.