A Study Of High School Students’ Vocabulary Acquisition In Bilingual Biology Teaching

It is noticed, from our present English teaching, that although there have been dozens of attempts of reform, English teaching has been recognized as "time-consuming, low effectiveness". From the point of view of the second language acquisition theory, the main problem lies in:1) Students do not have enough and interesting input. If we want to get our students to achieve the degree of using English fluently and correctly, our total class hours of foreign language courses from primary school to university are not enough.2) Students do not have enough output. English language teaching in our country has not got rid of "teachers talk and the students listen".3) There is no virtual learning environment. The environment in the English class is an imaginary environment.4) The students did not have intense interest in English learning. And they are lack of confidence.The purpose of this study is to offer empirical data of students’vocabulary acquisition in bilingual teaching. The research questions are:(1) Can the bilingual biology teaching in senior high school promote the professional vocabulary acquisition?(2) What vocabulary learning strategies affect students’vocabulary acquisition?The subject of this study are students from two parallel classes of Xiangfu High School in Changsha. Research instruments are questionnaires, pre-test and post-test papers. The study’s background is bilingual teaching, using quantitative research methods. Through the biological vocabulary experimental teaching, the function of bilingual teaching in promoting students’English vocabulary acquisition is studied and the analysis of vocabulary learning strategies which have significant correlation with vocabulary learning modes has been done.The results of the study show that:(1) Bilingual teaching can promote English vocabulary learning. Through one-way analysis of variance experimental class students outperformed the control class in the English vocabulary level.(2)8kinds of vocabulary learning strategies correlate with vocabulary scores. This indicates that the vocabulary learning strategies can influence the vocabulary achievement. The strategies are "Key word","Contextualization","Self-Evalua- tion","Inferencing","Transfer","Connection","Note-taking" and "Apply’ The study has its limitations and I hope I have research opportunities in the future.