A Study On Context-based Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is one of the three elements of language(pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar), which is regarded as the foundation of language. The efficiency of vocabulary has a close relation with learners’ communicative competence. At the same time, vocabulary plays a critical role in English teaching. However, vocabulary teaching is time-consuming and poorly managed in China. It is very urgent to explore a scientific and effective vocabulary teaching method.In recent years, some experts and teachers have been exploring new methods of vocabulary teaching. Many of them are committed to the application of context theory to vocabulary teaching. However, they just pay attention to the stage of presenting new words in the teaching process, and neglect the stage of consolidating new words. This thesis mainly continues to explore the concrete teaching methods of applying context theory in vocabulary which is used in the presentation and consolidation stage. The following three hypotheses are examined:1. Can context-based vocabulary teaching improve students’ ability of using vocabulary learning strategies?2. Does context-based vocabulary teaching effectively improve the students’ competence of vocabulary application?3. Can students improve their word guessing ability by context-based vocabulary teaching?The participants of this experiment are 96 students from the Third Senior High School in Zaozhuang, who are Class One and Class Two in Grade One. They are named randomly EC and CC. Context-based vocabulary teaching is adopted in EC, while traditional vocabulary teaching is carried out in CC to conduct English vocabulary teaching. The experiment lasts for one semester. At the beginning and at the end of the experiment, the data is collected by quantitative and qualitative methods, such as tests, questionnaires and an interview. Then they are analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The results indicate that the scores of the experimental class, in which vocabulary is taught through the context-based method, are much better than those of the control class in which vocabulary is taught mainly through the traditional method. The study suggests that context-based vocabulary teaching can improve students’ ability of using vocabulary learning strategies. In addition, context-based vocabulary teaching can effectively improve students’ competence of vocabulary application and students’ word guessing ability.