A Study Of Context-based Approach In Junior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is an essential part of foreign language learning because of its fundamental position. However, it is found that many students in China are not interested in learning English vocabulary. And more and more English teachers realize that students may remember a lot of words or idioms, but they cannot use them appropriately. Based on this situation, this thesis aims to explore a method which is more effective and practical in vocabulary teaching. The purpose is to arouse students’ interests towards vocabulary and help them improve their competence of applying vocabulary. Junior high school is the real fundamental phase for English learning in China, so students of Grade One in junior high school were chosen as the subjects.The study mainly explores the effectiveness of context-based approach in the application of English vocabulary in junior high school. Two classes which had nearly the same average scores in the school entrance examination were chosen as experimental class and control class. The same textbook and workbook were adopted in the two classes.During the eleven-week experiment, vocabulary was taught through context-based approach in experimental class, while traditional method was adopted in control class. Besides, questionnaires, vocabulary tests and interviews were adopted as research instruments. Vocabulary tests were given to both classes before and after experiment, while at the same time the same questionnaire on students’ attitudes towards vocabulary was handed out to the experimental class only. After experiment, nine students in the experimental class were interviewed to obtain more details about students’ attitudes towards vocabulary and context-based approach. After analyzing the data via statistics software SPSS 13.0, it proved that the performance of the experimental class was much better than that of control class. Meanwhile, the students of the experimental class showed more interests in learning vocabulary than before. Therefore, the researcher draws the conclusion that context-based approach can highly improve the students’ vocabulary performance and improve their attitudes towards vocabulary as well. At last suggestions concerning the context-based approach and vocabulary learning are given in the end of the thesis.