On The Effects Of Levels Of Context On Junior Middle School Students' English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary is to language what brick is to building.Like brick is the smallest component of the building,vocabulary is the smallest component of language.As the foundation of language,vocabulary is one of the most critical factors to learn English.Relying on vocabulary,people can express their ideas and communicate with each other.If a person doesn't master the vocabulary,it's impossible for him to master the language itself.Whether a person can grasp a large vocabulary may directly affect the richness and accuracy of his language expression.As the fundamental step of English teaching,vocabulary teaching cannot be ignored.In previous days,vocabulary was usually learned and recited mechanically.The most common way for learners to learn vocabulary is memorizing by repetition.They always read out each word and its corresponding Chinese meaning repeatedly and continuously,trying to memorize all the words.Many English teachers may have found this method slow and ineffective.Students also find that they still cannot remember the new words well or understand the meaning of the text although they have learned the each word's Chinese equivalent.Therefore,it's indispensable to apply a more effective method to teach English vocabulary.In fact,context is conductive to vocabulary learning.It restricts the real meaning of a word and helps people understand the word.Besides,the meaning of a word also depends on the context which affects the whole purpose of the conversation or text.context is the key to vocabulary teaching.More and more teachers have been aware of the importance of context in vocabulary teaching and put the context theory into vocabulary teaching.According to the previous research,the context which is made up with the co-text of words can be divided into three different levels:lexical context,sentence context and text context.All of them can be used to teach English vocabulary.Based on the real situation and the context theory,this thesis mainly focuses on three questions:1.Whether the different contextual teaching methods have different effects on English vocabulary learning?2.Which context level is more effective to learners'vocabulary learning?3.What kind of effects do the different contextual teaching methods have on various aspects of vocabulary learning?The author will conduct an experiment to investigate the effects of three context levels on the English vocabulary learning of Chinese students.In this study,the author used three different contexts to carry out three vocabulary teaching treatments:teaching vocabulary in the lexical context which means putting the target words in the related collocations;teaching vocabulary in the sentence context which means putting the target words in the related sentences;teaching vocabulary in the text context which means putting the target words in the related text.The participants were one hundred and twenty students in Class 1,Class 2 and Class 3,Grade nine of Linyi No.2 Middle School at Shanxi province.The author taught the three class English vocabulary with lexical context,sentence context and text context respectively.After three treatments,the immediate post-test and delayed post-test were carried out in three classes.After collecting and organizing the test scores,the author analyzed all kinds of information with SPSS,trying to explore the research questions.The experimental results show that teaching vocabulary in different context levels has different effects on students' vocabulary learning whether in immediate post-test or delayed post-test.In immediate test,the lexical context performed better than the other two context levels.However,in delayed post-test,the text context performed best.What's more,based on the analysis,it obviously suggests that teaching vocabulary in different context levels has different effects on various aspects of vocabulary learning.