The Application Of Situational Teaching Methods In Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

With the reform of high school entrance examination,the methods and core of English teaching are also changing.According to the English curriculum standards,junior three students in Shanghai should master and comprehensively use at least 1,600 English words and fixed collocations when they graduate.In addition,students also need to master various meanings of a single word in a specific context.Therefore,English vocabulary teaching in junior high school should focus on educating students to master different meanings and usages of core words in order that students can flexibly make appropriate use of the target words based on the contexts and topics.However,nowadays,the traditional time-consuming vocabulary teaching methods are still being widely adopted.Teachers intend to take control of the whole class dominantly while the students are obliged to practice using the vocabulary in a mechanical way.Traditional vocabulary teaching lacks vividness and interactivity,which is not conducive to mobilizing students’ exploration spirit in vocabulary learning.Therefore,I conducted a one-semester teaching experiment by means of questionnaires,interviews,and tests,to explore the effectiveness of the situational teaching methods,enabling students to transform the rote memorization into comprehensive use in combination with the situations and contexts.Based on the data and analyses,it can be concluded that with the application of situational teaching methods,students can be engaged in learning vocabulary actively and memorize words more efficiently.They can also learn to use the words comprehensively to promote their understanding of the vocabulary previously-learnt,and ready to absorb much more lexical knowledge more willingly.