An Action Research On Improving Junior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Knowledge Based On Production-Oriented Approach

In language learning,vocabulary learning is fairly important.However,in English instruction,vocabulary knowledge is often acquired incidentally,and instructional teaching activities are typically conducted independently and in isolation from communicative scenes,leading to students being not able to use vocabulary accurately and appropriately in specific contexts.Vocabulary knowledge can be divided into receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge.Students’ vocabulary learning always stays at the level of comprehension and lacks of the ability to apply vocabulary to specific context.Thus,most students only pay attention to learning the receptive vocabulary knowledge and ignore mastery of the productive vocabulary knowledge.Based on this,it is crucial to explore the teaching mode of vocabulary knowledge learning.The production-oriented approach(POA),advocates a productive mode of teaching while runs through the teaching process.This study focuses on the effects of‘motivating’,‘enabling’ and ‘assessing’ in teaching mode of POA on junior high school students’ receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.The core questions of the study are:(1)What are the effects of POA-based vocabulary teaching on junior high school students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge?(2)What are the effects of POA-based vocabulary teaching on junior high school students’ productive vocabulary knowledge? In order to answer the research questions,this study takes 40 Grade seven students as research subjects in junior high school in Shenyang and conducts a three-month action research.Classroom observation,questionnaire,test and teacher’s reflective journal are used to collect the data on the changes in students’ vocabulary knowledge ability.Excel and SPSS are used to analyze the data.The results show that vocabulary teaching based on POA can partly promote junior high school students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge such as orthographical knowledge,morphological knowledge and semantic knowledge and obviously improve junior high school students’ productive vocabulary knowledge such as register knowledge and pragmatic knowledge.This study provides English teachers new ideas of vocabulary teaching in junior high school,improves students’ attention to vocabulary knowledge learning,and advances students’ vocabulary knowledge learning ability through the application of POA teaching mode.