Application Of The Autonomous Learning Model For English Vocabulary Instruction In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary is one of the three elements of a language. What is more,language acquisition begins with vocabulary. So it plays an important rolein language study. In this thesis, it is argued that learning vocabulary wellmakes great contribution to the development of grammar, listening,speaking, reading and writing, and to the enrichment of English culturalknowledge, and vocabulary learning even has effect on learners inintelligence as well as in education.Vocabulary is so important, but in senior high school vocabularyteaching, there still lies the problem of "time-consuming andpoor-efficiency". Usually teachers pay much attention to vocabularyteaching; they are busy teaching students the pronunciation, the meanings,the uses of vocabulary, while students are busy listening to their teachersand taking notes. This kind of "duck-stuffing" teaching method is notlikely to arouse students' interest in vocabulary; it is also bad for them toestablish self-confidence in vocabulary learning. Day after day, andmonth after month, they will lose interest and confidence in vocabularylearning, which will lead to the declination of the effect of vocabularyinstruction. So for vocabulary teaching, the thesis argues what studentsreally lack is not teachers' vocabulary instruction, but the guidance onhow to learn vocabulary effectively and efficiently. In other words, theylack the autonomous vocabulary learning abilities. To promote the effectof the vocabulary instruction, the writer tries to combine vocabularyinstruction with autonomous learning, and explore how to adopt the vocabulary autonomous learning (AVL) model so as to cultivate students'vocabulary competence in senior high school. Based on the questionnairethat the writer conducted in No. Twenty Middle School, the thesisdesigned the detailed contents of the AVL model. In this model, teacherstry their best to alter their own roles, to arouse students' vocabularylearning interest, to help them build their confidence in vocabularylearning, to develop their vocabulary autonomous learning ability. TheAVL Teaching Model is only a hypothesis intended to promote seniorhigh school students' vocabulary competence and the effect of teachers'instruction, so in the following parts, the thesis tries to prove the diversityand reliability of the hypothesis from theory to practice.The thesis first explores main theoretical bases for AVL. Then basedon the theoretical inspection of autonomous learning, it introduces theprocedure of carrying out the AVL Model experiment in No. 20 MiddleSchool of Changsha. The procedure was divided into three stages: thepreparatory stage, the practical stage, and the summarizing stage. At thepreparatory stage, all the subjects were tested on the pre-researchvocabulary test, and the writer wrote down their scores. Then, at thesummarizing stage, the subjects were tested on the post-research test, andtheir scores were also noted down. According to the results of the twovocabulary tests, the writer made a measurable analysis, and then drewthe conclusions: the AVL Model can promote students' vocabularycompetence in senior high school (SHS); and it can also improve theeffect of teachers' vocabulary instruction in SHS.The AVL Model is an efficient way to improve students' vocabularyability. It is not difficult for students to possess the ability of autonomous vocabulary learning or get into the habit of AVL, if teachers can payattention to changing their own roles in teaching, strengthening students'motivation of vocabulary learning, arousing students' interest invocabulary learning, and developing their meta-cognition and vocabularylearning strategies.