A Study On The Teaching Of Designating Nouns In Primary School English In Shanghai

Vocabulary learning is a basic element in learning English and is the importantpremise of developing language skills. Due to the immature ability of abstractthinking of primary school children, only a few basic grammatical rules can be taught,which makes vocabulary teaching crucial in primary school English courses.But after the investigation, it can be found that as the unified textbook used byprimary schools in Shanghai and the only official source of acquiring vocabulary,Primary Oxford English (Shanghai Edition) cannot satisfy childrens curiosity ofknowing new words, and neither can it give full play to the advantage of childrenslanguage learning ability. Therefore, increasing the vocabulary teaching and learningin primary schools becomes the one-must way. But adding vocabulary is notrandom-like: what kind of vocabulary should be added into the existing one, as wellas what the exact number of additional vocabulary is, must be both taken intoconsideration.This study consists of four main parts: first, through the investigation of realEnglish teaching situations and teaching materials in Shanghai, some deficiencieshave been found out; second, through the literature review on the theories ofchildrens cognitive development of lexicon, the feasibility and necessity of increasingvocabulary in the primary school English teaching are ensured; third, after comparingand analyzing words in various parts of speech, the concept of“designating nouns”is put forward, and the functions of“designating nouns”are elaborated; fourth,referring to a few criteria, a new word list of designating nouns for primary schoolstudents in Shanghai is eventually completed.As a conclusion: adding some designating nouns can broaden children’s scopeof knowledge and improve their cognitive abilities, while choosing the nouns calls formany conditions, e.g. the nouns have to be interesting and useful.