Action Research On Context-Based Vocabulary Teaching In Secondary Vocational Schools

Vocabulary teaching is a crucial element of English teaching in secondary vocational schools,and it largely determines the success or failure of English teaching.The effectiveness of vocabulary teaching is correlated with the achievement of learners’ English learning objectives.In the past few decades,scholars at home and abroad have proposed a variety of approaches to teaching vocabulary,and context-based English vocabulary teaching has gradually become more widely used.The contextual approach is considered to be more suitable for secondary school students because of the special characteristics of these students,such as their various English foundation and lack of interest in learning English.This paper is to explore a major issue,namely how to use contextual theory to improve the efficiency of teaching English vocabulary in secondary vocational schools,and to discuss in three aspects:1)How to create a context suitable for the learning of particular vocabulary?2)How can teachers use contexts to improve the students’ memorization of the vocabulary?3)How can teachers use contexts to improve the students’ use of the vocabulary?This study takes first-year students of tourism management in the secondary vocational school where the author works as the research target,and "plan-implement-observe-adjust"as the main research steps to implement two rounds of action research.And to combine the analysis of questionnaires,test results and teacher interviews to study the impact of teaching English vocabulary in context on the effectiveness of teaching English vocabulary in secondary vocational schools.The study found that context-based English vocabulary teaching can improve the efficiency of English vocabulary teaching in secondary vocational schools to a certain extent.First of all,by linking to real-life situations,create a familiar language environment for students;by creating contexts of increasing difficulty that from simple daily conversations,to topic descriptions,to scenario practice,students can gradually adapt;by using multimedia tools to enrich the way contexts are created and presented,the classroom can be kept fresh.Secondly,the design of ample and interesting contexts stimulates students’ interest in learning English vocabulary and increases classes participation,thus increasing the frequency of students receiving English vocabulary information,which can deepen their memory of vocabulary;in addition,the implementation process of contextual teaching combines language or images and other forms to assist vocabulary understanding,improve students’ ability to guess the meaning of words,and consolidate their vocabulary memory through contextual association.Finally,through understanding the meaning of the context,students are able to use their mother tongue to understand vocabulary meaning and property and thus use them in a rational way;moreover,under the contextual approach,the vocabulary is explained in relation to the utterance and the discourse,using different contexts designed for students to practice repeatedly and improve their ability to formulate sentences.This study has certain pedagogical implications:The implementation of context-based English vocabulary teaching in secondary vocational schools can be effective,but in the process,it is necessary to consider students’ foundation comprehensively and pay attention to their state,design a context suitable for them;in addition,attention should be paid to the difficulty and richness of context creation so that students can not only gradually adapt to the contextualized mode of teaching,but also remain engaged in the classroom.In the course of the study,the author also found the limitations of the study in that the number of subjects was small,limited to one class;and the large number of activities added for classroom interaction under contextual teaching affected the teaching schedule.This paper will make suggestions based on the problems that emerged from the study with a view to the further development of English vocabulary teaching in secondary vocational schools.