The Application Of The Context Theories To The Vocabulary Teaching In Middle School

As we know, vocabulary teaching plays an importance role in foreign languageteaching. Students’ proficiency of vocabulary is directly related to their communicativecompetence and the success of language teaching. In China, lots of researchers havedone lots of researches on the vocabulary teaching in middle school. From theresearches, they find there are some problems existing in vocabulary teaching in lots ofmiddle schools.With the reformation of teaching method, educators and scholars start to payattention to the study of vocabulary teaching. The Chinese scholar Qiu Liwan(2003)states that vocabulary teaching based on context theories can improve the learners’interests, make the learners understand the meanings of the words fully and accuratelyand improve their communicative competence. But regarding to how to apply contexttheories to the vocabulary teaching in class, few of them have given their concretestudy results.As for the problems in vocabulary teaching in middle school, this paper tries toprobe an efficient way based on the context theories. In this paper the author proposestwo research questions (1) Does teaching vocabulary based on context theories arousethe student’s interests and have positive influence on their vocabulary learning strategy?(2) Can teaching vocabulary based on context theories improve the students’proficiency of vocabulary application？In order to study the two questions，an experiment approach is taken in this thesis.Two classes of students are chosen as the experimental class and control class. In thestudy, three instruments are adopted to make sure of the validity and the reliability. They are questionnaires, vocabulary tests and an interview. Then the data is collectedand analyzed by SPSS10.0. With the positive finding, the author therefore can getanswers to the two research questions (1) Teaching vocabulary in context can arousethe students’ interests and have positive influence on their vocabulary learningstrategies.(2) Teaching vocabulary in context can improve the students’ proficiency ofvocabulary application.Through this paper the author hopes to attract the English teachers’ attention tovocabulary teaching and make further study on how to teach vocabulary effectively byapplying the theories of context. It will be helpful to improve second language teachingin middle school.