An Empirical Study Of Contextual English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle Schools Based On The Concept Of The New Curriculum

Vocabulary is the basic building material of all languages and also the base of English learning. According to the new curriculum, a senior school graduate is required to master about 3300 words and 400---500 phrases, learning strategies and the ability of communication(2003:16-17). Thus, many scholars at home and abroad have focused their research on how to optimize the approaches to teaching English vocabulary to improve the capacity of vocabulary application in communication. But in the traditional teaching mode, teachers are accustomed to adopting the "duck—filling" method to instill knowledge into the minds of their students while students recite the words and expressions by rotten learning,but can't use them properly, both of whom neglect context where meaning comes from and context meaning of vocabulary. Therefore, context input in a proper way is desired to enrich context knowledge of students and to develop their conscious use of context strategies.In order to carry out English vocabulary instruction effectively and raise students' capability of vocabulary application, namely, using them correctly in the context, the writer of this paper conducted a vocabulary instruction experiment, which aims at researching the effect of the method of teaching English vocabulary to senior middle school students based on the theory of context. The subjects are students of Class 8 and Class 16 in Grade Two. Class 8 is the experimental group and Class 16 the controlled group. The students in the experimental group were taught with the new approach with the intention of arousing their learning interest and fostering the ability to use the words they learn in communication correctly.The result of the experiment shows that there are more high -efficient learners with high scores in the test and the whole test in the experimental group than in the controlled group, and the high——efficient learners have benefited more from the new method. The result also shows that the new method of teaching English vocabulary to the students is conductive to their improvement of communicative competence.After the experiment, a discussion is held on valuable experience and problems in application, It is derived that conscious use of context, various context knowledge and context strategies are of great importance in English teaching and learning. Meanwhile, some problems are analyzed, including casual arrangements of teaching time, simplicity of context input, neglect of social and cultural background context input and teachers' lack of awareness of context and ineffective use of context strategies. To deal with the problems, the suggestions are given with the hope that they will offer help to improve high school English vocabulary teaching and learning and enlightenment to teachers in better use of context theory in high school English teaching, which is also the requirement of the new curriculum.