An Action Research On English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

As the hope of a society,Junior high students need to have consolidated basis of English language skills so that they can adapt the changeable global information-based era and contribute themselves to their mother country.Junior high is an important age for the students to learn English actively and attain positive emotion of learning,including vocabulary accumulation and language improvement.As a result,English vocabulary teaching in junior high school plays an important role in English teaching,because vocabulary is a foundation for junior high school students to learn a foreign language.Using traditional way of English vocabulary teaching costs too much time and energy.It also lacks effectiveness and hinders students' development of integrated language skills.According to the discussion with some fellow teachers,most teachers have conscious of bad effects of the traditional teaching situation but still have no plan to change.Because they think research is too hard to do.In fact,the action research is easier to do than other researches.Therefore,this paper aims to do an action research to find an effective way instead of the traditional way to teach vocabulary in junior high school's classes,hoping to enlarge the students' vocabulary effectively and improve their abilities to apply these words to their real life.This thesis has two objects of study,applying a 18-week acting research on two classes in Grade 8.By analyzing the comparison of the pretest and the preliminary investigation,the research questions was proposed.The action research aims to help junior high students to enlarge their vocabulary effectively and help students learn vocabulary learning strategies effectively.This action research has two stages.The first one is through teacher effectively presenting new English vocabulary in different ways in class.The second one is based on the first with some revision which pays more attention to connect vocabulary teaching with vocabulary application so that students can use what they have learned.After finishing two rounds of actions,a post questionnaire,aninterview and a post test were conducted promptly.The results were analyzed and summarized as follows: First,teaching phonetic symbols is one of the effective ways to teach vocabulary.Secondly,it is very important to cultivate students' vocabulary learning strategies when teaching English vocabulary.Thirdly,effective English vocabulary teaching should care about students' feelings of learning experience.Last but not the least,effective English vocabulary teaching should combine the vocabulary with practicing other integrated skills.Above all,English vocabulary teaching has two objects,including teachers and students.Although much of the work of vocabulary learning is the job of the students,teachers' guidance and help are very valuable.If teachers can present vocabulary effectively in class,it can save a lot of time and energy for consolidation and application.