The Application Of Narrative Approach In English Vocabulary Teaching Of Senior Middle School

It is well acknowledged that vocabulary learning is one of the most basic parts of English learning.No one can improve English abilities like listening,speaking,reading and writing without a good vocabulary base.With the development of the New Curriculum Standards,the standards for vocabulary teaching in senior middle schools have been higher and higher.However,the present situation of practical vocabulary teaching in high schools is far from satisfactory.To learn vocabulary only by reciting can not increase students’ efficiency of vocabulary learning;furthermore,it would decrease students’ interest in English learning.In this condition,the author put forward the view of applying narrative approach,a relatively new teaching method,into vocabulary teaching of senior middle school to improve the current situation.Narrative approach advocates using narrativized methods to design the teaching process.Besides the traditional narrative way,narrativized methods also include non-verbal narration,little space story,narrative sentence and so on.Narrative approach mainly aims at creating a real situation or possible world in which students can fully engage themselves in and finally acquire language.However,as a rather new theory,previous researches on narrative approach mainly centered on the theoretical level.Therefore,this research is trying to find out the real effect of the application of narrative approach in vocabulary teaching of senior middle school;then,the author designed a four-month experiment to answer the following three research questions:(1)Can students’ learning interest in English vocabulary be improved after the application of narrative approach into their vocabulary teaching?(2)Can students’ vocabulary competence be improved after the application of narrativeapproach into their vocabulary teaching?(3)How is narrative approach implemented in vocabulary teaching and what teaching strategies should be used?In this experiment,two paralleled classes of Grade One were chosen from the Second Senior Middle School of Zhengyang County,one as the experimental class and the other as the controlled class.During the four months’ experiment,the author applied narrative approach in vocabulary teaching in the experimental class while the controlled class was taught still under the traditional vocabulary teaching method.The research instruments used in this experiment include pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview.At the end of the experiment,the author used SPSS to analyze the data collected from the tests and questionnaire and also made discussion on the results of the experiment.The results of the experiment show: narrative approach is suitable and effective in vocabulary teaching of senior middle school.It is efficient in the aspects of stimulating students’ learning interest in vocabulary learning,improving their vocabulary competence and developing their mental abilities such as imagination and creation.As for the teaching strategies,the five-step teaching method,which was designed by the author based on her study of narrative approach,was proved very effective in vocabulary teaching in the experiment.Strategies used in this method mainly contains: vocabulary teaching through narrativized ways like narrative sentence,non-verbal narration,little space story and so on;story-telling which includes target vocabularies in order to strengthen students’ memory;narrative creation by students themselves to deepen their understanding to new words.Besides,it should be mentioned that various teaching activities should be applied into vocabulary teaching to increase students’ learning interest.