A Study On The Application Of Context Theory To Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

The study of vocabulary is the foundation of English learning, whichplays an important part in the English learning. With the development of thevocabulary teaching, more and more learners pay attention to the vocabularyteaching under the contextual theory.The concept of context theory was first put forward by Malinowski, aPoland anthropologist. In the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century,linguists began to combine the context theory and vocabulary teaching.According to the research of some linguists, context cab be divided intolinguistic context, situational context and cultural context. The theoreticalfoundation is divided into two parts: the practical usage of the context theoryin the presentation of the words and the consolidation of the words.In the practical English teaching, the traditional vocabulary teachingmethod is widely used. The teachers usually give the students the task of readand recite the English words, and then let the students write the words frommemory. However, this kind of vocabulary learning method make manystudents have the feeling of dull and dry in English vocabulary learning, andtherefore, produce very little effect. The students’ ability of using thevocabulary in the daily communication cannot be developed. Therefore, it isurgent to investigate and find out a more effective and more meaningfulvocabulary teaching method. This thesis aim at investigating the following three hypotheses: the context theory guided vocabulary teaching method canhelp the students learn the vocabulary; the context theory guided vocabularyteaching method can improve the students’ English level; the context theoryguided vocabulary teaching method can make the students more interested inthe English vocabulary learning.In order to test the three hypotheses, the author started the research by theexperiment in Guiyang No.13middle school. Two classes in the grade onewere chose as the experimental class and the controlled class. The experimentlasted about four months. After the experiment, according to the data of theposttest, the author have found that English vocabulary teaching guided by thecontext theory do have some positive effect in the senior high school Englishvocabulary teaching and can help improve the senior high school students’English level. Through the class observation, the author concluded that theEnglish vocabulary teaching guided by the context theory can contribute todevelop the students’ interest in English vocabulary learning.Finally, according to the findings of the experiment, the author proposedsome practical ways of how to connect the context theory well with thepractical senior middle school vocabulary teaching.