A Study On The Situational Teaching Method And English Productive Vocabulary Competence Among Higher Vocational School Students

Nation proposed two components that make up of the vocabulary knowledge, production and reception on the basis of former researches in1990s. The productive vocabulary refers to those words that should be used properly both in speaking and writing in addition to the recognition of the pronunciation, form and meanings. Vocabulary is indispensable for listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Both teachers and students should be aware of its importance. The reality is that the vocabulary learning effect of college students is not satisfactory:the vocabulary amount is relatively small, productive and receptive vocabulary are imbalanced developed and the productive vocabulary is obviously insufficient (Wang Yan,2006). As is stated by Schmitt&McCarthy (2002) that language user can completely understand a conversation or some certain vocabulary in a text but cannot apply these words and phrases in oral and written production. As a matter of fact, the problem of small vocabulary amount and researches on teaching method of enlarging students’vocabulary have been paid high attention to by teachers and researchers and many discussion and researches have been devoted to it. However, the lack of productive vocabulary that hinder the development of speaking, writing competence and the integrative English competence is seldom touched upon. Few research has been made on the development of productive vocabulary competence in general, not to mention the productive vocabulary competence of higher vocational school students.The higher vocational school students usually have weak linguistic basics, low interest and low motivation to English learning. For most of them, the classroom learning is their only means of learning English. Moreover, comparing to the CET-4requirement of the ordinary university, many higher vocational schools even don’t have the requirement of CET-3. Most of the students in higher vocational school memorize the vocabulary in an alphabetical sequence attached to the coursebook before the examination. In addition, the traditional vocabulary teaching method teachers adopted is fundamentally dictation and explanation with examples but such method is of no benefit to the learning of productive vocabulary which is necessary in speaking or writing. Quite the contrary, the aim of higher vocational school education is more practical and worldwide so that the requirement for speaking and writing ability also increases. How to develop the productive competence of higher vocational school students in classroom teaching has been a topic for teachers and researchers. On the other hand, the situational teaching method is a new method that could motivate students and improve the learning efficiency by teachers combining the mental characteristics on the basis of coursebook and creating various real situations that conform to student’s mental statement and relate to their daily life thus integrate the cognitive activity to emotional activity and promote the development of logic and imagery thinkings. Consequently, the thesis is aimed to apply the situational teaching method to the development of productive vocabulary competence of higher vocational school students and try to answer the following two questions:On one hand, to figure out whether the situational teaching method can help to improve the productive vocabulary competence (including vocabulary size and vocabulary depth) of the higher vocational school students; on the other hand, to find out other positive influences the situational teaching method has such as students’attitude and motivation to English especially vocabulary study, role changes of the students and teacher, and the teacher-students relationship.This thesis is an experiment that carried out between two classes in the department Integration of Mechanics and Electrics from Hubei Light Industry Technology Institute. During a two-months period, two47-students classes, one is the experimental class which the situational teaching method is adopted while the other one the traditional method is carried out. Lexical tests, questionnaire and interview are used for date collection. After the experiment, the vocabulary evaluation software Range designed by Nation and SPSS19.0are used to analyzed the data. The experiment obtained the following findings:1. The effectiveness of the situational teaching method on the development of the productive vocabulary competence is justified. The vocabulary size has an evident increase especially the word families whereas the development of vocabulary depth is inconspicuous.2. Students’ attitude towards vocabulary learning and English learning has changed and their learning interest and motivation are enhanced and at the same time, the atmosphere in classroom and the teacher-students relationship are alleviated and improved to a certain degree during the implementation of the situational teaching method. In the meanwhile, the role of students in the classroom is altered from passive acceptors to participants.The findings of this research give the following practical enlightenments:firstly, as an important linguistic competence indicator, the level of productive vocabulary competence decides the quality and quantity of the word production, the experimental analysis of how to improve the competence can provide some references and implications for further research and vocabulary teaching. Secondly, the research justifies the effectiveness of the situational teaching method in improving the productive vocabulary competence and the teaching method can be regarded as a complementary one to the traditional teaching method for it especially motivates and increases the learning efficiency of the lower-achieved students. Thirdly, for the group of higher vocational school students who is often neglected, this experimental research may help to shed some new light on their English and particularly vocabulary learning and teaching in the future.