| As is an integral part of foreign language teaching, vocabulary teaching is directlyrelated to the development of the learners’ communicative competence. But vocabularyteaching in most vocational colleges is followed the traditional methods by teachingEnglish words and their equivalents of Chinese in texts, which results in that students’recognition of communicative function of language is not enough. With the developmentof researches on English teaching methods, many scholars and teachers come to realize theimportance of context in understanding the meaning of words and sentences and try toencourage the language learners to guess word meaning in context. However, theresearches of vocabulary teaching based on static context can not effectively explain anddirect communication, for it ignores language users’ cognitive ability and their activecontrol over context. The text in the textbook is also a static context and is quite differentfrom the real communication, if vocabulary teaching and learning only occurs in a staticcontext, the learners are not be able to realize that the language is ever-changing in theprocess of communication, and they won’t know how to apply the newly-learned wordsinto their daily life.According to Adaptation Theory, language communication is a dynamic process ofchoice making, and what make it possible for language users to make choices are the threeproperties of language, i.e., variability, negotiability and adaptability. Context is generatedin language use and keeps changing with communication. It is not only a static adaptation,but also a dynamic construction. Therefore, the teacher should pay attention to the designof various activities in vocabulary teaching and try to construct a dynamic communicativecontext which not only is related to realistic life but also is close to natural English forstudents to practice the newly-learned words so as to help them acquire pragmaticcompetence of vocabulary.An empirical study is carried out in this present thesis to illustrate the specific operation and application of this new approach in vocabulary teaching, as well as to proveits effect. The study is conducted among60first-year Tourism Management majorstudents in two natural classes in Hunan Railway Vocational Technology College, who aredivided into the control group and the experimental group for comparison. In theexperimental group, the approach of teaching and learning vocabulary in a dynamiccommunicative context is adopted, while in the control group, the traditional teachingapproach is applied. The questions are presented before the experiment:1) If the approachof teaching and learning vocabulary in a dynamic communicative context can help thevocational college students form a positive attitude towards vocabulary learning?2) If thisapproach can help the vocational college students to understand the true meanings ofwords?3) If this approach can help the vocational college students greatly improve theirpragmatic competence to apply the learned words in language communication? Accordingto the analysis of the data collected, the students in experimental group have performedmuch better compared with those in control group. They have become more confident thanbefore, had stronger initiative of learning vocabulary, and shown more interest andmotivation in vocabulary learning. This new approach can efficiently help the students tounderstand the true meanings of words and improve their pragmatic and communicativecompetence of vocabulary, manifesting that the new teaching approach is virtuallyremarkably superior to the traditional one. However, with the limitation in this study, moreimprovements are expected in the future researches. |
