A Study On The Effectiveness Of Keyword Method In English Vocabulary Teaching Of Junior High School

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of any language. Vocabulary acquisition plays a vital role in language acquisition. Vocabulary teaching also has an important position in teaching process of any levels of foreign language courses. Previous researches consistently indicated that the use of certain mnemonic devices could produce high levels of memorization of L2vocabulary to some extent. Of all the mnemonics, the most often studied with the most impressive results is the "Keyword method" which proposed by Atkinson in1975. Atkinson divides vocabulary learning into two stages in this method. The first stage requires the students to associate the foreign words with the keywords, an association that is formed quickly because of acoustic similarity. The second stage requires the students to form a mental image of the keyword,’interacting’ with the meaning of target word. On the basis of two steps above, recalling the image reminds the students of the target words as well as the meaning of them. The levels of processing theory (Craik&Lockhart,1972) and the dual-coding theory (Paivio,1975) can be regarded as the theoretical basis of the Keyword method.The present study attempts to testify the effectiveness of Keyword method combined with the features of semantic elaboration in traditional classroom teaching.60junior high school students of grade8participated in this experiment. Subjects in experimental class used keyword method to learn the new vocabulary during the whole second term of grade8. The pre-test before the research was the final exam of the first term. The post-test after the research was the final exam of the second term. The aim of the pre-test was to investigate whether these two classes were almost at the same level. The aim of the post-test was to investigate whether the experimental class has a better performance on vocabulary learning than the control class. By the classroom teaching experiment, the questionnaire and the aid of SPSS19.0on data analysis of pre-test and post-test of experimental class and the control class, the findings support the hypothesis that keyword method could help junior high school students to memorize English vocabulary more effectively. Meanwhile, keyword method not only has the theoretical value but also has practicability in real English classroom vocabulary teaching process. The association with already-learned knowledge could not only reduce students’feeling of frustration when learning new words, but also reflect the positive transferability of new knowledge.