An Action Research Of Peer Teaching In English Vocabulary Teaching In The Primary School

A successful language communication as speaking, listening, reading and writing, is based on lots of vocabulary. Vocabulary learning is very important to the language learners. But the students of the author, who are from rural primary school in grade four in Gaoyao, are not able to understand the vocabulary easily or pay more attention to learn vocabulary. Moreover they are not willing to review and preview the knowledge in time, so they will forget the words they have learned quickly. As a result, they are unable to remember the more words they have to learn.Less vocabulary they remember less interest they feel in English learning, which directly affects the development of their knowledge and the training of learning abilities. So it is necessary to enhance the students’ interest in English learning and improve their ability of vocabulary memory. In order to find an efficient method to solve these two problems, the author implements an action research of peer teaching in English vocabulary class. The Peer Teaching is a teaching approach that the same or similar learning levels of the students in a group help each other under the guidance of a teacher and also learn by teaching. A set of peer teaching is a student-oriented teaching organization form, which includes peer preview, peer introduction, peer revision. In this research, the author hopes to encourage the students to join into the activities of teaching and learning for improving their abilities of vocabulary comprehension and memory. At the same time, peer teaching provides a large amount of comprehensible language input and output for the students. They can practice more what they have learned in the class. On the other hand, the students can reflect their own value in this learning method. The author hopes that this achievability can make great interest for the students in their English learning.At the beginning, the author identifies the problems and gives hypothesis from the analysis of the vocabulary pre-test, the interest pre-questionnaire and the pre-interview. In the experiment, the author discovers some problems according to the classroom observation, teacher’ reflection and students’ interview, and thenmakes appropriate measures to adjust the experiment process better in the vocabulary class after analyzing the data. At the end of the experiment, the teacher does an interest questionnaire, a vocabulary post test and a students’ interview for examining whether the peer teaching enhance the students’ interest in learning and whether improve the their ability of vocabulary memory and comprehension.After analyzing the data, the author finds that the students are very willing to preview and review. They expect to have English class, especially vocabulary class.Because they can teach, practice, discuss and play with their companions. In addition,their ability of vocabulary memory and comprehension is improved. They like to remember the words with others. They like peer teaching. It makes vocabulary teaching and learning more interesting and efficient. But there are still some limitation in Peer Teaching method. The way of getting information for the students and the time of word teaching preparation are limited. Both of them in the Peer Teaching need our careful consideration.The Peer Teaching approach has been widely used abroad, but there is little research about it in China, especially in primary school. This research aims to explore how to implement the Peer Teaching approach better in English vocabulary class in primary school.