A Study On Deep-level Vocabulary Association Memory Strategies In Junior High School English Teaching

Vocabulary is the foundation of all the language skills. The four most important skills of English, namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing, are all inseparable from vocabulary.However, according to the investigations and research in China and abroad, it is found that many learners of English as foreign language are not able to master vocabulary well, and it becomes the most difficult item in English learning. The present domestic researches mainly focus on college and senior high school students, but seldom involve junior high school students. Furthermore, according to the author’s investigation, the problem of vocabulary leaning in junior high school was more serious, and more than95%of the students thought their vocabulary learning was hard. Their major obstacles came from two aspects:on one hand they often forget learned words very quickly, and on the other, they do not know how to use the words correctly. Teachers usually adopt traditional vocabulary teaching approaches, and students chiefly use rote memory to learn vocabularies. In traditional vocabulary teaching, teachers teach vocabulary separately from the context. Generally speaking, they only teach the pronunciation, spelling and Chinese meaning of a word, and rarely touch other aspects of the word, such as its paradigmatic meaning relations and syntagmatic meaning relations. Accordingly, the students may remember some words, but they still can not use them correctly. The method of rote memory is used via constant repetition. A large number of researches show that effective vocabulary learning is not just rote memory, it should include various learning strategies, especially memory strategies, in particular, association strategies.Based on the Theory of Depths of Information Processing and cognitive teaching approach, the author presents some integrated association memory strategies named Deep-level Vocabulary Association Memory Strategies (DVAM strategies). In order to verify the effectiveness of DVAM strategies, the author carried out an experimental study among92students in Grade8of Tangshan No.17Junior High School in Hebei Province. The experimental instruments include tests of vocabulary level and questionnaires. The data was analyzed by adopting Paired-Sample T-test of SPSS19.0. The result shows that after the students experienced a period of guidance and training of DVAM strategies, their competence of memorizing and using vocabulary improved greatly. It is proved that the training of DVAM strategies can help students learn vocabulary more effectively.