An Empirical Study Of The Contextualized English Vocabulary Teaching And Learning In Senior High School

Vocabulary,as one of the three elements of language,plays an important role in language learning,which lays the foundation for learners’ listening,speaking,reading and writing.Without vocabulary,it is impossible for learners to listen,speak,read and write.Consequently,sound vocabulary knowledge is the basis and precondition of learning language well.However,in traditional vocabulary teaching,teachers are used to explaining the pronunciation,formation,meaning of words or expressions,ignoring the use of vocabulary in context.What’s more,there is lack of the training of the efficient vocabulary learning strategies.Students mainly learn vocabulary through the rote learning,so,they can’t internalize the vocabulary that they have learned into their own language system.As a result,the more vocabulary they learn,the more difficult they feel,which increases students’ learning burden.Gradually,it makes vocabulary learning time-consuming and less efficient and even students lose their interest in English learning.This thesis aims to make an empirical research on how the contextualized vocabulary teaching improves students’ English vocabulary.There are two research questions raised in the thesis:(1)To what extent can the contextualized vocabulary teaching stimulate students’ interest in vocabulary learning?(2)How can the contextualized vocabulary teaching improve students’ ability in using vocabulary?In order to answer the two questions,the experiment took the 150 students as research subjects to make an empirical research.The students were from Class Five and Class Six,Grade One in Jianguo Senior High School,Zheng’an,Zunyi,Guizhou Province.The whole experiment lasted 15 weeks.During the experiment,the data of the pre-test showed that there was no significant difference between the two classes interms of students’ average vocabulary learning level.Class Five was selected as the experiment class,teaching vocabulary based on the contextualized vocabulary teaching and Class Six was chosen as the control class,applying the traditional vocabulary teaching method,which puts too much emphasis on the pronunciation,formation and meaning of vocabulary.In the experiment class,vocabulary was taught in sentences,discourse and passages.Meanwhile,students were encouraged to guess the meaning of vocabulary from the context where the vocabulary occurs to train their independent learning ability.The research results showed that the contextualized vocabulary teaching method was efficient,which not only stimulated students’ interest in vocabulary learning,but also improved students’ ability to use vocabulary.