A Study On The Employment Of Games In Teaching Vocabulary At Junior Middle School

With pronunciation and grammar, vocabulary is one of the three essential components that compose language knowledge and the building material of languages. The famous linguist D.A.Wilkins(1972) indicated,"Without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." So vocabulary acquisition becomes a key aspect of language learning. The amount of vocabulary affects listening and reading comprehension as well as oral and written expressions because vocabulary is an essential block of language. The new English Curriculum Criteria set higher requirements for vocabulary teaching and learning. Nevertheless, in China, vocabulary teaching is time-consuming but inefficient and makes many students lose confidence of learning English. In such a situation, the junior middle school English teachers should consciously explore effective vocabulary teaching as a breakthrough at the bottleneck. After a survey about vocabulary teaching, according to the guidance and motivation theory of cognitive psychological characteristics of middle school students, the author integrated vocabulary teaching with game-playing to teaching practice and proved that this new method is very effective. The experiment was conducted in two parallel classes with one as an experimental class and the other as a control class. The experimental class adopted the game-involving teaching of vocabulary, while the control class adopted traditional teaching of vocabulary. Through one term’s experiment, the result showed that the experimental group has made more progress than the control group. We could also come to the conclusion that adopting positive methods or techniques that are suitable for English vocabulary teaching can bring the learners’ initiative into full play, and enhance the students’ confidence in learning English.