Effects Of POA-based Vocabulary Teaching On English Polysemous Words Acquisition Of Junior High School Students

English polysemous words are examined quite frequently in different important tests for junior high school students.However,studies indicate that the students concerned have difficulties in mastering them.Considering the benefits of Production-Oriented Approach（POA）,it is tentatively used in this study to stimulate students’ learning motivation and help them bridge the gap between input and output in vocabulary learning.This study applies POA to junior high school teaching of English polysemous words and aims to answer the following questions.1.Compared with the usual vocabulary teaching method,can POA enhance English polysemous words acquisition of junior high school students?If yes,in what ways are the learning effects manifested?2.How will POA-based vocabulary teaching influence the English polysemous words acquisition of the learners at different levels（including high,medium and low levels）?A sixteen-week experiment was conducted with the students of Class 6 and Class 9 of Grade 8 in a middle school in Yancheng City,Jiangsu Province.After the pre-test,which shows no significant difference between the two classes in understanding and using English polysemous words,Class 9 was selected as the experimental class（EC）to be taught in POA,while Class 6 was as the control class（CC）to adopt the usual vocabulary teaching method.Both classes were taught by the researcher.The performance of the students in the pre-test and post-test was compared to measure the influence of POA-based vocabulary teaching on students’ acquisition of English polysemous words with the help of the SPSS.The major findings of the study are as follows:First,compared with the usual vocabulary teaching method,POA can generally enhance English polysemous words acquisition of junior high school students significantly,substantially improvin g students’recognition of the different meanings of English polysemous words and their abilities to use English polysemous words correctly.Second,POA has considerable influence on students at different levels and can effectively improve their acquisition of polysem ous words.The results indicate that POA has the greatest effect on the low-and medium-level students,with the least effect on high-level students.This study offers the following teaching implications:First,teachers need to make full use of diverse resources to create realistic scenarios in which middle school students can actually apply polysemous words.Second,teachers can design a variety of enabling activities with diverse forms and contents in order to increase students’ participation.Finally,POA might need improvement in its section of Teacher-Student Collaborative Assessment by taking into more consideration the typical samples of high level students.The conclusions of this study would have been more solid with a bigger sample size and a longer duration of the teaching experiment.