Investigation Of English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools

Language is based on vocabulary and cannot exist without it.Vocabulary has a great effect on listening,speaking,reading and writing abilities and is the foundation to develop students’ language skills.Mastering a vocabulary,to some extent,means being able to know its corresponding vocabulary in the native language.However,it is far from enough.In fact,mastering a vocabulary and using it accurately mean knowing its pronunciation,spelling and multiple meanings,grammatical and pragmatic features,derivatives,its relationship with other vocabularies.,so vocabulary teaching is the basic task to us teachers and will be of great importance to improve students’ vocabulary and communication abilities.I have found it difficult for students to remember vocabularies during my teaching career.They always spend a large amount of time on it but achieve little.In English teaching,traditional teaching methods have played a key role for a long time.What the teachers have been doing is to explain the meaning of new vocabularies and the students’task is to remember new vocabularies,so students know little about the usage of each vocabulary and do not improve their language skills,though they are good at spelling and meaning.The modem communicative language teaching focuses much on indirect teaching.Teachers are to guide students to acquire new words in the process of receiving language information,training their ability to guess the meaning of words and to use the language synthetically.Students’ pragmatic competence improves,but they are poor in collocation and usage.Teachers and students have not attached enough importance to vocabulary in language learning,ignoring that vocabulary teaching should run through the whole process of English teaching and putting it in the second place.In order to make clear what approaches middle school teachers often adopt in the vocabulary teaching,the connections these approaches have with the vocabulary learning effect,the problems in vocabulary teaching and how to teach vocabulary effectively,research approaches of questionnaire,investigation and interview were adopted in this thesis,with the help of 30 English teachers and 880 students in a senior high school in Yicheng,Hubei Province.Starting off present vocabulary teaching situation of the English teachers in this school,I have found out that teachers tend to use audio-visual method,phonetic spelling method,word formation,synonym method,theme-based approach,context method,communicative approach,graphic method and mechanical method.Certain single methods,however,cannot motivate students or provide them with enough comprehensible input.Students usually adopt phonetic spelling method,word formation,synonym method,context method and mechanical method to learn vocabulary,but most of them are not able to apply what they have learnt to their daily life and even some only use mechanical method.So teachers must attach importance on vocabulary teaching and use various teaching methods and teaching aids to improve vocabulary teaching effect.