On The Application Of Contextual Approach To Senior High School Vocabulary Teaching

As one of the three elements of language,vocabulary always occupies an important position in English teaching.Besides,vocabulary directly affects the development of English learners'skills such as listening,speaking,reading and writing.The General High School English Curriculum Standard?2017 Edition?puts forward high requirements for students'vocabulary,which clearly points out that high school students need to master about 3500 words and 500 fixed collocations,using vocabularies to express different attitudes and functions at the same time^[1].However,lacking the guidance of good teaching methods is bound to affect the effect of students'vocabulary learning.The current domestic English vocabulary teaching neglects the specific language environment of vocabulary in many cases,and often teaches vocabulary in isolation,which easily makes students lose interest in vocabulary learning.This in turn leads to a passive attitude towards vocabulary learning.Based on this situation,this study tries to apply contextual approach to English vocabulary teaching in senior high school,and designs context-based vocabulary teaching activities to explore the following two questions:?1?How does the contextual approach affect students'attitudes toward English vocabulary learning??2?How does contextual approach affect the effects of high school students'English vocabulary learning?In this study,70 students from two natural classes in a key high school in Yueyang were studied,and a 16-week vocabulary teaching experiment was carried out.In the course of the experiment,the experimental class adopted the context-based English vocabulary teaching,and the regular class received the conventional vocabulary teaching.After the experiment,a statistical analysis of the data collected through the vocabulary test was made,together with a questionnaire survey,interviews and other tools,to discuss the above two questions.It is found that context-based vocabulary teaching method has a significant effect on the vocabulary learning attitudes of high and middle level learners.It is mainly reflected in three aspects:?1?Learners recognition of vocabulary learning becomes higher.?2?The high and middle level learners show a strong interest in vocabulary learning after the experiment,and take the initiative to make a vocabulary learning plan.?3?Most of the students in the experimental class abandoned the way of memorizing words by rote,and the number of students who chose to guess words according to context,sentence pattern,and textual context increased significantly.At the same time,with the change of students'attitudes toward vocabulary learning,the effect of vocabulary learning has also changed positively,which is mainly reflected in two aspects:?1?The students'vocabulary application ability is obviously enhanced after the experiment.Most students take the initiative to apply the words they have learned to English dialogue and writing,and some of them chose to check their vocabularies by reading articles.?2?The post-test vocabulary scores of the experimental class increased more than that of the regular class,indicating that context-based vocabulary teaching can effectively improve the effect of vocabulary learning.Therefore,the application of contextual teaching method to senior high school has brought some positive effects,which have certain guiding significance for the current vocabulary teaching.