A Study On The Appllication Of Context Therory To The Teaching Of English Vocabulary In Junior High Schools

With language,culture can be transmitted and ideas can be communicated.Vocabulary is the basic component of the language.To learn the language well,it is necessary to learn vocabulary well.In recent years,lots of scholars carried out studies on the vocabulary teaching from many aspects.However,under the pressure of the entrance examination and the rootedness of traditional teaching methods,the teaching of vocabulary in junior high school is not optimistic.Isolated vocabularies are taught by teachers in the class and vocabularies are learned mechanically by the students.Many students complain that learning vocabulary is boring and they cannot use the words properly.Correspondingly,their English performances are not as good as expected.In recent years,more and more teachers and scholars realize this problem in vocabulary teaching and learning and devote themselves to studying how to teach vocabulary effectively.An increasing attention has been paid to contexts.Context theory was first proposed by Malinowski in 1923.And then,it was gradually developed.In 1960 s,people began to connect context theory with vocabulary teaching.Contexts can help to decide the meaning of a word and remove vagueness.In context,vocabularies become more meaningful.So it is beneficial for students to learn vocabulary according to contexts.Therefore,the author tries to apply context theory to arouse students’ interest in vocabulary learning and change their attitudes towards it in order to improve their vocabulary competence.But to what extent and in what aspects it will influence students’ vocabulary learning,there is still no final conclusion.This paper tries to use the experiment to investigate the effects of the application of context theory to the teaching of vocabulary on students’ vocabulary learning.This experiment was conducted in Puyang Second Senior High School and lasted for about five months.Class 2 and Class 3 in Grade 8 were selected as the research subjects in which Class 2 was the experimental class and Class 3 the control class.In the experimental class,contextualized vocabulary teaching method was used while in the control class,vocabularies were taught in the traditional way.And the research instruments were tests,questionnaires,interview and class observation.After the analysis of the experimental data,the study concludes that the teaching of vocabulary with context theory can improve students’ interest in learning vocabulary effectively and their vocabulary learning strategies.What is more,it can have a positive impact on students’ vocabulary competence.There are also some problems with this teaching method.For example,the class time is difficult to control at first and for the students,they may forget to take notes which is not good for them to review the words and some low proficiency students have little improvements in vocabulary learning.