The Application Of Context Theories To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

For many years, it has been the truth that vocabulary teaching was neglected by most teachers. Although vocabulary is the cornerstone of English learning, many teachers believe that knowledge of vocabulary can be learned by students themselves and vocabulary teaching should subordinate to the teaching of language skills. Consequently, a large number of students have lower efficiency in learning words and phrases, which has a negative influence on language competence of learners for a long period. Even though senior high school students have learned English for a few years, they are still far from being competent English learners. Mastery of vocabulary is of great importance to them.This thesis, in order to find a more efficient and effective way to teach vocabulary in senior high school, explored vocabulary teaching on the basis of context theories. The author first reviewed studies concerning vocabulary knowledge and context theory at home and abroad. Two hypotheses were posed:1) Teaching vocabulary in different contexts could have a positive effect on students’ attitude to vocabulary learning;2) Applying context theories to vocabulary teaching will improve students’ comprehension of English vocabulary and scores in vocabulary learning. Then a vocabulary teaching, which was designed according to context theories, was conducted in experimental class while control class was taught pronunciation and Chinese meaning of new words as usual. And Experimental class and control class were compared to see if there were differences in their learning. Context-based vocabulary teaching was carried out from the following five aspects: lexical context, grammatical context, verbal context, situational context and cultural context. Both questionnaire and vocabulary tests were employed before and after the experiment. Then the data were collected and analyzed by SPSS13.0. The results show that context-based vocabulary teaching has positive effects on student attitude and can improve their vocabulary competence and scores in vocabulary test. In the last part of thesis, limitations and implications were listed.