On The Current Situation And Counter-measures Of English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Schools

As it is well recognized that vocabulary is the construction material of language and there would be no language without words. Previous studies have shown that, to a large extent, successful foreign language teaching depends on the effectiveness of vocabulary teaching, which covers the students'capacity of vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary proficiency as well as their vocabulary size. Hence, vocabulary teaching is one of the most important steps in language teaching. However, in senior English teaching, vocabulary teaching has always been a big headache for teachers in China nowadays. And the current situation of vocabulary teaching is far from satisfactory. At present, in the national college entrance examination, vocabulary quality and capacity is paid much attention to. Besides, according to Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards (2003), the requirements of vocabulary capacity for senior school students has increased from 2,000 to 3,500, which includes some words examined in GEM4 and GEM6. Thus, how to improve English vocabulary teaching so as to achieve the vocabulary teaching task has become an urgent problem. Therefore, it is necessary and essential to make an investigation into the current situation of English vocabulary teaching and find out existing problems and relevant counter-measures.In recent years, the research focus on English teaching has shifted from"how to teach"to"how to learn". The key to achieving this goal lies in the acquisition and application of learning strategies. As the learning strategies acquisition is listed as one of teaching objectives in Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards (2003), the importance of learning strategies becomes more and more prominent. Among diverse strategies, meta-cognitive strategy is regarded as a higher-level one, which applies meta-cognitive knowledge consciously to plan, monitor, manage and evaluate the learning task. The self-management strategy demonstrated in Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards (2003) refers to the meta-cognitive strategy. Only when students are competent to plan, monitor and self-regulate their whole learning processes can they become initiative and successful learners. Thus the correct application of meta-cognitive strategies is bound to promote the vocabulary learning of senior students, and contribute to guiding them to lay a solid foundation of vocabulary within limited time.Fourteen English teachers and 111 students in Senior Three in No. 7 Middle School of Weifang City, Shandong Province are chosen as the subjects of the present research. The author has investigated the current situation of English vocabulary teaching with the methods of questionnaire and interview. The data collected are analyzed by SPSS 13.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). By means of survey, through detailed analysis and discussion, the main findings of the research can be summarized as the follows:⑴The teachers have guided the students to build up proper vocabulary learning beliefs but most students haven't turned the beliefs into practice. The students still tend to acquire words by rote repetition.⑵The use frequency of strategies can be shown as follows: Word list > Selective attention > Guessing > Rote > Dictionary > Encoding > Rehearsal.⑶The students'diverse strategies acquisition mainly relies on their teachers'instruction. However, most teachers haven't realized the importance of meta-cognitive strategies. Even if some have realized the importance, they fail to apply them to their routine teachings. Most students fail to plan, manage and monitor their vocabulary learning scientificly due to lack of meta-cognitive strategies, which contributes to the time-consuming and low effective vocabulary learning and hinders their effective employment of cognitive strategies. Hence, it is high time to systematically train the students by integrating meta-cognitive strategies.In order to carry out the meta-cognition vocabulary teaching effectively, large quantities of previous studies on meta-cognitive strategies and vocabulary learning strategies home and abroad are taken as the references. Based on O'Malley&Chamot's meta-cognitive strategies theory, this research intends to explore how to integrate meta-cognitive strategies training into vocabulary teaching in senior schools, as well as put forward practical training models. The experimental class was instructed and mainly trained through 4 steps, namely: preparation, presentation, practice and evaluation, while the controlled class was only trained with certain cognitive strategies of vocabulary learning strategies. Through the ten-week meta-cognitive strategies training, the results of the experimental class students have been improved greatly. Through investigation and discussion, this research holds that the conscious meta-cognitive strategies training in English vocabulary teaching in senior school can enhance students'self-control, develop their self-management and produce significantly long and positive effect on their vocabulary learning, which can lay a foundation for their further study in college. Besides, the findings of this research can provide positive reference for English teachers of senior schools. The understanding of the current situation of senior students'vocabulary learning and the general characteristics of strategy application in vocabulary learning can help teachers to find out students'shortcomings of strategy application so as to guide them to regulate vocabulary learning strategies purposefully, and provide meta-cognitive strategies training, thereby improve their automatic learning ability.