Schema Construction And English Vocabulary Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Vocabulary is of great importance in the teaching and learning of a second language. How to improve the quality and efficiency of vocabulary learning has always been a major concern for second language learners. However, vocabulary teaching has not been given the deserved emphasis till now. In recent years, there appear increasing enrolments in vocational colleges and the students are generally poor in English with a small vocabulary size. Many teachers have been trying to urge the students to strengthen vocabulary learning, but they do not seem to have provided the students with effective methodological advice on how to master vocabulary, and the result of vocabulary teaching and learning in classroom is not satisfactory. Actually, rote learning is still a typical way of vocabulary learning by now. As a result, a large number of students do not have a good grasp of vocabulary.Schema theory interprets the language learning process from a cognitive perspective, and it has been widely applied to the teaching of reading and listening comprehension. However, few studies relate schema theory to vocabulary teaching, especially to that of vocational college English;and studies that combine semantic, morphological and phonetic factors in vocabulary instruction are rare. From the cognitive perspective, the present study intends to explore how to apply schema theory to English vocabulary teaching, and discuss how to help students to improve their vocabulary learning, cultivate their language awareness and develop their interest in language learning as well. Therefore, students can make use of their abundant L1 background knowledge to construct the schematic network of target language vocabulary through ways of association, semantic mapping etc., so as to improve the laborious and boring way of rote learning.The thesis firstly describes the present situation of English vocabulary learning in vocational colleges. Next, it gives a review of the relevant theories and researches on vocabulary teaching and learning. Then, taking schema theory and image schema theory as the rationale, the research explores how to guide students to understand and apply vocabulary construction. A term-long comparative experiment between an experimental class and a control class is designed to study the process and result of constructing their semantic, orthographic and phonetic network in vocabulary learning. In the experiment, the subjects were 101 first-year students majoring in Marketing in Shandong Vocational College of Economy and Trade.The collected data was processed by SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) and a supplementary investigation through interview was also carried out. The result shows that students can benefit from schema construction in their vocabulary learning, as can be seen from the higher mean scores of the experimental class in the post-test. So, in this sense, the study has obtained a meaningful result.By comparison, we find that students with better grasp of vocabulary before the experiment in the experimental class have achieved an obvious improvement, while students with poor foundation in English have not. Based on the study, the author draws out some implications and puts forward some pedagogical suggestions on vocabulary teaching and learning while the weakness of the study is also mentioned.