Vocabulary teaching is one aspect of language teaching that has not been given the attention it deserves until recent years. For a long period of time, vocabulary is simply taught in the way by asking students to stud...Vocabulary teaching is one aspect of language teaching that has not been given the attention it deserves until recent years. For a long period of time, vocabulary is simply taught in the way by asking students to study and memorize its meaning and spelling, its part of speech and its general function in a sentence. Thus, a student with a command of five thousand English vocabulary still finds it hard to adapt himself to the requirement of our demanding reading assignments, in particular, to the extensive reading task, which is more demanding due to its wide range of materials and large amount of vocabularies. According to Wilkins (1979: 111) "Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." Yet without a deeper understanding of how vocabulary is taught in the classroom and which methods of teaching are more effective for learners, the teaching of vocabulary may not achieve the desired effects. By researching the topic on vocabulary learning and instruction, this essay intends to bring the attention of both teachers and learners to the weaknesses of the traditional approach of teaching vocabulary and some different strategies in vocabulary instruction with the aim of improving the students’ reading comprehension.\;展开更多
Currently,a growing number of educators are aware of the need to look for new approaches to replace the"spoon-feeding"method.Therefore,the context-based strategy began to emerge.This study aims to investigat...Currently,a growing number of educators are aware of the need to look for new approaches to replace the"spoon-feeding"method.Therefore,the context-based strategy began to emerge.This study aims to investigate how students derive information through contextual clues by examining the progress of Chinese middle school EFL students in terms of word recognition.The participants of this study included 20 eighth grade students from the same middle school.The participants sat for two different quizzes:a contextual vocabulary quiz(quiz A)and a direct instruction quiz(quiz B).In quiz A,the participants inferred the meaning of the target words from the example sentences,whereas in quiz B,the students utilized the accompanying English explanation to guess other new words.These students were in the experimental and control conditions,respectively.The two quizzes comprised of 15 multiple choice questions(MCQ)which differentiated the participants?word recognition response to two different learning methods.There were two significant findings from this study.First,the results showed that the context-based strategy leads to a better vocabulary learning performance compared to the direct instruction strategy.Second,although it is not as effective as the context-based strategy,the direct instruction strategy may assist EFL learners in remembering words in short term.展开更多
文摘Vocabulary teaching is one aspect of language teaching that has not been given the attention it deserves until recent years. For a long period of time, vocabulary is simply taught in the way by asking students to study and memorize its meaning and spelling, its part of speech and its general function in a sentence. Thus, a student with a command of five thousand English vocabulary still finds it hard to adapt himself to the requirement of our demanding reading assignments, in particular, to the extensive reading task, which is more demanding due to its wide range of materials and large amount of vocabularies. According to Wilkins (1979: 111) "Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." Yet without a deeper understanding of how vocabulary is taught in the classroom and which methods of teaching are more effective for learners, the teaching of vocabulary may not achieve the desired effects. By researching the topic on vocabulary learning and instruction, this essay intends to bring the attention of both teachers and learners to the weaknesses of the traditional approach of teaching vocabulary and some different strategies in vocabulary instruction with the aim of improving the students’ reading comprehension.\;
文摘Currently,a growing number of educators are aware of the need to look for new approaches to replace the"spoon-feeding"method.Therefore,the context-based strategy began to emerge.This study aims to investigate how students derive information through contextual clues by examining the progress of Chinese middle school EFL students in terms of word recognition.The participants of this study included 20 eighth grade students from the same middle school.The participants sat for two different quizzes:a contextual vocabulary quiz(quiz A)and a direct instruction quiz(quiz B).In quiz A,the participants inferred the meaning of the target words from the example sentences,whereas in quiz B,the students utilized the accompanying English explanation to guess other new words.These students were in the experimental and control conditions,respectively.The two quizzes comprised of 15 multiple choice questions(MCQ)which differentiated the participants?word recognition response to two different learning methods.There were two significant findings from this study.First,the results showed that the context-based strategy leads to a better vocabulary learning performance compared to the direct instruction strategy.Second,although it is not as effective as the context-based strategy,the direct instruction strategy may assist EFL learners in remembering words in short term.
