An Empirical Study On Association Strategies In Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is considerably important in the process of learning English. Therefore, an increasing number of linguistic scholars both in China and abroad pay attention to words learning. Especially, the study of vocabulary strategies attracts the majority of linguistic scholars’attention.Through reading a great number of international relative literature, the thesis compares the deep-encoding strategy with the shallow-encoding strategy. In order to achieve the goal of using of association strategies in English vocabulary teaching, the dissertation puts forward to the vocabulary teaching model with core of the deep-encoding strategy.The research includes the following three questions:(1) Can association strategies get to our aims of making reciting tedious vocabulary vivid, and making students happy and interested in learning vocabulary?(2) Can association strategies help middle school students establish correct cognition structure and instruct them to analyze and generalize the regularity of vocabulary structure?(3) Can our aims of the conversion of words from the short-term memory into the long-term memory and broadening the amount of words be achieved by the use of association strategies?In order to answer above three questions based on psycholinguistic theories, an experiment with80students from grade one of the junior middle school has been done. The students are divided into two parts; they are the experimental class and the control class respectively. Class two is the control class, and Class four is the experimental class. In the process of practicing the experiment in the experimental class, we use the teaching model based on the association strategies. In the control class, the traditional teaching model is popular. At the same time, by means of using SPSS and the quantitative method, we analyze the results from the data statistics to get the average value, standard deviations, t-tests and so on and so forth which serve as comparative reference.According to the statistics after exam, students in the experimental class are better than those in the control class. Through observing the situation of the classroom and three t-tests, we found that students in the experimental class have better ability of self-inquiry learning in vocabulary learning and they are more active in thinking.Above all, the three questions based on psycholinguistic theories were proved by the experiment. Meanwhile, it demonstrated the effectiveness of the association strategy based on the encoding strategy in the middle school English vocabulary teaching.Through the study, results indicate that English vocabulary teaching model based on association is feasible to improve vocabulary learning efficiency of students and provokes the development of students’ thinking, which leads to a more active and effective learning atmosphere in the classroom. Therefore, the learning style of students also can be improved. The dissertation focuses on fostering their ability of independence, on strengthen their creative ability, on enhancing their ability of exploration, all of which is beneficial to their positive development of vocabulary learning.