An Investigation On The Application Of Association Strategies In Junior High Students’ English Vocabulary Learning

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2017 Edition)was released and implemented in 2017.According to the curriculum standards,there are clear grade standards for language knowledge of junior high school students.Among them,the requirements for the vocabulary of junior high school students have been increased.As for the growth of vocabulary requirements,junior high school students face a considerable challenge in vocabulary learning and memorization.Therefore,as one of the strategies widely used in vocabulary teaching in recent years,association strategy is also loved by students in their daily learning and memory of words with its interesting and diverse characteristics.However,the current situation of students’ using association strategy in vocabulary learning,their problems in using it and the causes of these problems deserve further investigation and research by teachers and researchers.Based on previous researches,this paper studies and investigates the current situation of junior high school students’ use of association strategies.It analyzes and investigates the students’ application of association strategies in their daily learning and the reasons for the problems aroused in their learning.For this purpose,the author puts forward the following two research questions:1.What is the current situation of junior high school students’ application of vocabulary association strategy? And what are the problems?2.What are the causes of the problems in the application of vocabulary association strategies for junior high school students?In order to answer these two questions,the author takes a middle school in M City as an example,selecting all the eighth-grade students and six English teachers as the research subjects of the study.The author investigates the current situation of students’ use of association strategies through the analysis of questionnaires and vocabulary proficiency test papers,and then analyzes the causes of the problems through interviews with students and teachers.Through the investigation,the author finds that most junior high school students usually use the association strategies in their daily vocabulary learning.Among them,students use the strategies of phonetic and morphology association strategy most frequently.The following is the semantic association strategy,and the lowest frequency is contextual association strategy.The students’ attitude towards applying association strategies is positive.In terms of use,students use phonetic association strategy and morphology association strategy the most frequently,followed by semantic association strategy,and contextual association strategy the least frequently.Among them,the students are not proficient in phonetic problems and creating context,but they are good at some regular morphology association problems and fixed collocations.Finally,the author puts forward some suggestions for the reasons analyzed in this study related to students and teachers:Students should be clear about the concept and types of association strategies;teachers should also pay attention to students’ feedback and explain in time;both students and teachers should pay more attention to phonetic symbols teaching and learning;students should strengthen the training of association strategy after class,and teachers should also create more opportunities for students to learn vocabulary association strategies.