A Study On English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

The Reform Program for Basic Curriculums(Trial)(2001) asks to set up 9-year joint curriculum, and to set English lesson from higher grades in primary schools. In primary school, students can master vocabularies because they are less and more simple. But with the development of grades, there is a growing sense that vocabulary memory has become the biggest obstacle for learning English in junior high school, because of more and harder vocabularies. The English Teaching Syllabus for Full-time Junior high school of Nine-year Compulsory Education(Trial Revised Edition)(2001) sets the following objectives for vocabulary teaching of the junior high school: can use the basic spelling rules to spell words skillfully; can judge and memory meanings and classes of derived words and compound words according to the learned word-building; can grasp about 800 words, about 200 idioms and phrases, and can use them in written and spoken situations. In addition, students should recognize another 400 to 500 words.The junior high school students often spend much time in memorizing English words but afterwards they forget these words quickly. They are usually failed in mastering the basic meanings of the most often used words. If the situation or collocation is changed, they may become confused. This thesis aims at combining the English vocabulary teaching of junior high school with the memory psychology theories based on the predecessors’ research foundation to help the English teachers use betters ways to help students learn and memory English words.According to the memory psychology, we can analyze that there are special characteristics of junior high school students’ memory: conscious memory, meaning memory and abstract memory are in the dominant place. As a result, the English vocabulary teaching methods for junior high school should be suitable for the memory characteristics of them. In addition, proper reviews to avoid forget.The purpose of this thesis is to connect the English vocabulary teaching with the memory psychology to help the English teachers to find the proper way to teach English vocabularies, based on the theoretical basis of English vocabulary teaching and memory psychology.