A Study On The Application Of Cognitive Context In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

As is known to all, an increasing number of people are aware of the importance of English learning. According to the senior high school English curriculum standard, higher requirement on vocabulary for senior high school students has come up. This challenge means that vocabulary teaching plays an increasingly important role in English teaching. However,as a result of the varied amount of vocabulary and its complicated meanings, vocabulary learning discouraged students. Students forget the learned words over and over again due to lack of scientific methods. Students would lost their interest gradually. It is imperative to enhance English vocabulary learning effectiveness.Context puts these separated words back in the fresh discourses. However, context is regarded as a static concept from the perspective of the traditional context. Whether in the practical teaching or the procedure of learning, cognitive elements are barely connected with knowledge. Actually context is dynamic and variable in communication. Only context cognitionalized by individuals links learners with context genuinely.Based on cognitive context theory, this research focuses on exploring whether senior high school English vocabulary teaching has a positive impact on the interest, attitude,strategies and thinking patterns toward vocabulary learning. This thesis starts with analyzing the problem in the current vocabulary teaching and shows the significance of this thesis. And then the previous literature review of vocabulary teaching and cognitive context are straightened out and summarized. This research includes three experiments: questionnaires,vocabularies tests and think-aloud. 100 subjects come from two classes of Grade One of senior high school, with close English level, they are selected as experiment class and control class respectively. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the acquired data were carried out.From the result of the experiment, we can see the significant difference in interest, attitude,strategies and thinking patterns noted in experiment class before and after the experiment, but no obvious difference occurs in control class. It can be seen that vocabulary teaching on the basis of cognitive context has a definite advantage in comparison with traditional teaching methods. However, as a result of lack of teaching experience and limited level of research ability, this research still has limitations. In future, experience accumulation and reflection on language teaching should be done and new perspectives of cognitive context in the future should also be explored.