An Application Of Constructivism To English Vocabulary Teaching In The Senior Middle School

Vocabulary is an indispensable component of language system as well as the foundation of all language skills. Thus it is an essential element of language teaching and learning. How vocabulary is taught and learned has been the focus of research and field experiments for researchers and teachers of English.Constructivism, which has a great influence on the practice of education, has been prevailing since the late 1980s. As a philosophy of learning, it holds that knowledge is not passively received but built up by the cognizing subject and learning is active construction based on prior knowledge. Under the guidance of constructivism, this research intends to explore a more effective and practical approach to improve English vocabulary teaching in the senior middle school.To put Constructivist vocabulary teaching into practice, an empirical study was designed and carried out in two classes chosen randomly from Senior Two in Changsha Tian Jiabing Experimental Middle School. Traditional methods were employed in one group while Constructivist vocabulary teaching was conducted in the other during the 16-week experiment. The teaching procedures, including activities and tasks, were completely different in these two groups. Compared with the traditional transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the students, Constructivist vocabulary teaching focused on giving the students center stage in the classroom by providing them with environments and opportunities, which cultivated their self-awareness and made their vocabulary learning a more active process of knowledge cognition.At the beginning of the experiment a questionnaire was administered in both groups to make an investigation about the students' vocabulary learning. Besides, a pretest of vocabulary and a posttest of vocabulary were held to survey if the experiment was beneficial to their vocabulary proficiency. After the experiment, all the data collected was analyzed. The results show that the hypotheses of this study have been verified. That is to say, Constructivist vocabulary teaching contributes to cultivating students' self-awareness of knowledge construction in the process of vocabulary learning and improving their vocabulary performance, from which it can be concluded that Constructivist vocabulary teaching has positive effects on students' vocabulary learning.