An Empirical Study On Junior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary learning is crucial in language learning. For junior middle school students in the initial stage of learning English, a good mastery of English vocabularies can facilitate their language learning. But most junior middle school students are faced with great difficulties in vocabulary learning. They don’t know how to efficiently master English vocabularies. Besides, their vocabulary learning is basically focused on the English class, so a proper and effective vocabulary teaching method can help students a lot in learning English vocabulary.Since 1980 s, more and more attention has been paid to vocabulary teaching by scholars and teachers both at home and abroad. In China, with the implementation of the “New Curriculum Standards”(2011), junior middle school students are required not only to have a larger vocabulary but also to use the vocabulary correctly for different purposes. So there is an urgent need for junior middle school English teachers to explore an effective teaching method to help students meet the requirements of the new curriculum standards. This paper, under the framework of the New Curriculum Standards, is related to the TRI vocabulary teaching mode which is formed on the basis of the theory of context and the theory of memes(Memetics). The paper aims to explore a more effective vocabulary teaching method that suits junior middle school students. And the four hypotheses that the researcher makes are as follows:(1) Word guessing strategy training can help develop students’ interest in vocabulary learning.(2) The TRI vocabulary teaching method, compared with the traditional method, can better help raise students’ vocabulary level.(3) The TRI vocabulary teaching method can help improve students’ ability to use words correctly.(4) The TRI vocabulary teaching method, compared with the traditional method, is more efficient in promoting students’ vocabulary memorization.The author conducts an experimental teaching, with students from two classes of grade eight as the research subjects. The TRI vocabulary teaching method is adopted in one class, and the traditional vocabulary teaching method in the other class. The teaching experiment lasts for 10 weeks. Before, during and after the experiment, a total of two questionnaires and two vocabulary tests are applied to the two classes respectively. The analytic results show that students from the experimental class become more interested in vocabulary learning after the experimental teaching. Besides, students’ answers to the corresponding test questions are also analyzed, the results of which show that students from the experimental class don’t have obvious advantages over those from the control class in memorizing vocabularies; so the fourth hypothesis is false. In terms of the ability of using vocabularies, students from the experimental class have significantly higher scores than those of the control class.Based on the above discussion, it is concluded that under the framework of the new curriculum standards, the application of TRI vocabulary teaching method in junior middle schools is feasible and effective. In the end, the author expects that this paper can provide enlightenment for some more extensive follow- up studies.