A Research On The Application Of The "Production-oriented Approach" To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

The learning of vocabulary plays an important role in the process of language learning.Vocabulary has a great influence on the development of English learning ability and English communicative competence.Students are required to not only learn about the pronunciation,form and meaning of the word,but also apply the word properly in a specific situation by the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools.However,the traditional vocabulary teaching method pays more attention to telling the knowledge to the students rather than providing them with chances to use the target language.Students try to learn the vocabulary by memorizing them mechanically and lack the further processing and application of the vocabulary,which leads to the low efficiency of language learning.Besides,students gradually lose their interest in English learning.The production-oriented approach(POA)was put forward by Professor Wen Qiufang,which is based on Krashen’s input hypothesis,Swain’s output hypothesis and Long’s interaction hypothesis.Besides,Professor Wen combines the approach with the present teaching situation of Chinese colleges.There are three parts in the approach,teaching principles,teaching hypotheses and the teacher-mediated teaching process.With the problem of limited teaching time in class,POA aims to motivate students’ desire to learn and improve the learning efficiency and quality of English learning.After the approach was proposed,many researchers have made active studies on its theory and practice.It has been acknowledged that this approach can inspire students’ motivation and improve their pragmatic competence.POA was originally proposed to solve the problems in education reform of Chinese colleges,thus the study of the approach in senior high schools,especially in vocabulary teaching is very deficient.In order to help students learn the vocabulary more effectively and improve the teacher’s vocabulary teaching method,this study attempts to combine the POA with the vocabulary teaching in senior high school.There are three research questions involved.The first one is how to apply POA to the vocabulary teaching in senior high school.Thesecond one is whether this approach can enhance students’ vocabulary knowledge and the last one is what influence it has on students’ use of vocabulary learning strategies.The research was carried out in Fengnan No.2 Senior High School in Hebei Province.Two parallel classes from Grade Three were chosen to serve as the experimental class and the control class.The results of the pre-test indicate that there is no significant difference between the two classes.The two classes were taught by the same English teacher.The experimental class was taught with the method based on POA while the control class adopted the traditional vocabulary teaching method in the experiment lasting about four months.The experimental instruments include pre-test and post-test used to inspect students’ vocabulary knowledge and the questionnaires aimed to learn about their use of the vocabulary learning strategies.Both of the two classes finished the tests while only the experimental class did the questionnaires.There is no significant difference between the two classes in the pre-test,but the analysis of the post-test results indicates that there is significant difference between the two classes on their vocabulary knowledge.Besides,the mean of the experimental class is higher than that of the control class in the post-test.Thus the model applying POA to vocabulary teaching in senior high school can enhance students’ vocabulary knowledge to a certain degree.It can be concluded that this model can also have a positive effect on students’ use of vocabulary learning strategies by analyzing the results of questionnaires for the experimental class on vocabulary learning strategies,such as the memory strategies,resource strategies,regulation strategies(metacognitive strategies),cognitive strategies and activation strategies.After the analysis of the results,some implications on vocabulary teaching were proposed.First,make good use of the “motivating” phase to arouse students’ desire to learn and improve the learning efficiency.Second,apply multiple types of assessment,such as the Teacher-Student Collaborative Assessment to activate students’ initiative,in which assessment can promote their English study in turn.Last but not least,in the learning process,the teacher needs to guide the students to use more effective vocabulary learning strategies,such as the memory strategies to improve the learning effect.However,because of the constraints on time and the sample of the experiment,the differences of vocabulary knowledge and use of vocabulary learning strategiesbetween students at different levels in the experimental class were not studied.Besides,due to lack of the guidance of enough teaching experience,the teaching design needs improving.The future research can enlarge the experimental sample and explore more effective models to apply POA to vocabulary teaching in senior high schools.