Effective Techniques of Vocabulary Teaching in Middle School1

1、中学英语词汇教学技巧effective techniques of vocabulary teaching in middle schoolcontentsabstract.1key words1i. introduction.2ii. literature review.2iii. changes of vocabulary teaching31. vocabulary teaching is ignored in the past 32. vocabulary teaching is valued today . 4iv. problems on vocabulary teaching a

2、nd learning.41. problems on students vocabulary learning.42. problems on teachers vocabulary teaching 5v. effective techniques of vocabulary teaching .61. techniques of introducing new vocabulary .62. techniques of drilling and using new vocabulary . 83. techniques of expanding vocabulary 9vi. the s

3、tudents different feeling to every technique.9vii. conclusion.10references.10abstract: vocabulary is the material to make up the language and the scale to measure the learners levels. for english-learners, the one who does not have enough vocabulary can not listen, speak, read and write freely. thes

4、e are symbols to show the importance of vocabulary. a lot of students spent much time and energy to study vocabulary, but the result is still not satisfactory. and the efficiency of vocabulary learning can not be promoted a little higher. remembering vocabulary slowly, forgetting the vocabulary easi

5、ly and using vocabulary unsuitably are the common phenomena. inefficient learning vocabulary with a lot of time is closely linked with teaching methods. most of teachers teach vocabulary obeying the traditional way instead of adjusting to the current situation. in order to solve this problem, the pa

6、per, after describing the changes of vocabulary teaching, points out the current problems existing in vocabulary teaching. at the same time, it shows some effective techniques of vocabulary teaching in order to guide teachers to help students enhance their motivation of learning vocabulary. key word

7、s: effective techniques；motivation；interest 摘要：词汇是组成语言的基本材料，是衡量一个外语学习者水平高低的重要标准。对英语学习者而言，没有足够的词汇就不能有效地进行“听、说、读、写”。这些都足以证明英语学习中词汇的重要性。长期以来，词汇一直是我国学生学习英语的一个难点。许多学生虽然花费了大量时间来学习英语单词，但词汇学习的效率依然很低。词汇记忆速度慢，遗忘速度快，不能恰当运用词汇是学生英语单词学习中的普遍现象。学生词汇学习的费时低效问题和老师的词汇教学方法有密切的联系。许多教师教词汇的时候依照老的套路。针对这种现状，本文作者在简单描述了词汇教学经历的

8、变化之后，指出了当前中学词汇教学中存在的种种问题，并提出了一些行之有效的新式词汇教学方法，旨在引导教师帮助学生增强其词汇学习动力和提高其学习成效。关键词：教学技巧;动机;兴趣 i. introductionenglish, as the widely used language in the world, has been coming into our lives. since we were opened to the world, our country is filled with a fresh air. that is, “lets all come to study englis

9、h!” whether women or men, the young or the old, even the children of three or four and the elderly of sixty or seventy are all indulging themselves into the common trend. china has been revolved around the sea of english learning. so the english teaching has been promoted more highly than before. wh

10、at is vocabulary teaching? what is the most important component in vocabulary teaching? maybe we all know the word. a word is one of the three basic language units (sound, word, grammar). there are three distinguishing features of english vocabulary. firstly, the pronunciation of each word is corres

11、ponded to its spelling; another feature of english words is that they frequently have more than one meaning; the third characteristic is that english words can change their shape and their grammatical values, too. one of the famous linguists winkins once said that without grammar very little can be

12、conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. learning vocabulary is so important, but most of the students in middle school can not master and accumulate vocabulary to satisfy the current situation. here are some numbers in some middle schoolthe students are required to master 800 words. th

13、at is to say, a middle school graduated student should learn 800 words in three years, more than 250 words per year. generally, in china, english teachers in middle school are required to teach 250 words in 260 classes every semester, which means they teach one and a little more words on the average

14、 of each class. apparently, the english vocabulary teaching does not seem to bring much pressure on students. but what is the result? after each test, when most students are asked about the feeling of the test, the answer is often: “too many fresh words!” the teachers always feel that they spent a l

15、ot of time and energy with little effect. why? the reason is that the students remember all the words at that time, but they just remember them instead of understanding them. if they do not review the words for many times, they will find that they can not remember the words at all. according to this

16、 phenomenon, i introduce some effective techniques of vocabulary teaching in middle school in my thesis to help middle school english teacher teach vocabulary easier. ii. literature reviewdating from 1987, wilkins has done the research on english study. in his works foreign language study institute,

17、 he analyzed the steps for little children learning to speak language. little children learn to speak in isolated words and then in chairs of nouns and verbs. a child who says “mum bye-bye bike” is easily understood by english-speaking adult. students who are immersed into a new linguistic setting t

18、end to pick up vocabulary first, and then gradually develop a more accurate structural framework. and they must continually be learning words as they learn structures and as they practice the sound system. in winkins work, we can find the children learn to speak language experiencing “one word perio

19、d”, “two-word period”, “sentence period”(in this period, there may be some grammar mistake in their sentences), “structural sentence period”. the vocabulary is the basic of communication.in the following years, the field of vocabulary has always been researched. the field of vocabulary studies is an

20、ything but a neglected area. at that time, norbert schmitt and michael mccarthy published their work-vocabulary: description, acquisition and pedagogy. the book is in three parts. this division is not arbitrary, but correspond to what we feel are three main strands that contribute to an applied ling

21、uistic theory of vocabulary. firstly, vocabulary must be defined and described. secondly, vocabulary is also acquired, and is stored in and retrieved from the human mind. thus no theoretical framework is complete without consideration of questions of acquisition and mental processing. finally, the b

22、ook applied linguistic purpose is a pedagogical one, and pedagogical questions relating to materials, methods and syllabuses complete the framework for an applied linguistic perspective of lexis. i think that vocabulary learning is a long journey. students will lose their interest in only rememberin

23、g. then they even give up studying as time goes by. so we also have the duty to make them keep and even increase their interest in english. after all, developing the interest of vocabulary learning is an important thing. we should pay more attention and energy to it. there still is a long way in fro

24、nt of us. iii. changes of vocabulary teaching1. vocabulary teaching was ignored in the pastaccording to the research on vocabulary teaching, zimmerman in his work sencond language vocabulary acquisition pointed out that vocabulary teaching has never been paid attention to during the foreign language

25、 learning. this problem that vocabulary teaching was ignored was more serious in middle school. why was the vocabulary teaching always ignored? one reason is that some special meaning of words could not be adequately taught. so it was better not to try to teach the students. until the mid twentieth,

26、 many people noticed that vocabulary learning is not a simple matter that a certain word in one language has the same meaning as in another language. there is much more needs to be learned, not only the words but also the culture. then a lot of people felt the complexities were too great to be clear

27、ed up; another reason is that some people who gave advice to teachers seemed to be saying that words meaning can be learned only through experience. so students can not be adequately taught in classroom. as a result, some teachers gave up trying other methods to teach vocabulary. they paid little at

28、tention to techniques for vocabulary teaching.2. vocabulary teaching is valued todayas we enter the 21st century, vocabulary has assumed a more important role. in jack and theodores work-approaches and methods in language teaching, they said: “no matter how well the student learns grammar, no matter

29、 how successfully the sounds of l2 are mastered, without words to express a wider range of meaning, communication in a l2 just can not happen in any meaning way.” in recent years, there are a growing number of people who are foreign language learners. the purpose for people to learn english is not o

30、nly for passing the exam but also for communicating everyday. in the exam to enter the university, we find a new type of test question-vocabulary spelling. this is a symbol to show the importance of vocabulary. following the trend of exam, many middle schools emphasize the necessity of vocabulary te

31、aching. with this shift in emphasis, the classroom teacher is faced with the challenge of how best to help students store and retrieve words in the target language. iv. problems on vocabulary teaching and learning in middle school1. problems on students vocabulary learning the school has paid more a

32、ttention to the vocabulary teaching. but the result has not been satisfied. why? the reason is that some different problems in students prevent themselves from studying vocabulary well. here are some problems of students vocabulary learning. in the middle school, all the students know that vocabular

33、y learning is very important, but only a few students will spend 20 minutes a day in remembering vocabulary. the other students hardly spend time in vocabulary. the cause to this phenomenon is that the students have not found the suitable way for themselves to study vocabulary. paying more attention

34、 to the pronunciation, spelling, and meaning of words instead of the use is another problem. this method may cause that students know a lot of words, but they cant use them suitably and they will feel difficult in daily communication. a part of students think simply that once you master the spelling

35、 of words, you have mastered the words. nearly half of the students did not have a clear scale to measure mastering the words. when they can read the words or write a word both in english and chinese meaning, they think they have already mastered the words. these students pay little attention to the

36、 importance of vocabulary use. 2. problems on teachers vocabulary teaching because the middle school teachers are the premier ones who introduce students to the english, they bear the heavy burden. the teachers should try their best to find new and suitable ways to help students study vocabulary eas

37、ier. but we still can find that there are still some out-of-date traditional methods in vocabulary teaching of middle school. 1) teach words in isolation middle school english teachers in china usually ask students to learn vocabulary lists in which words are isolated from the context. in one case,

38、they let the students pick out all the new words in the text, list them on a paper, and consult the dictionary for the chinese or english meanings. this method may save time, but the relationship between words is ignored. neglecting the relationship of vocabulary might result in students slowness an

39、d restrict the students association.2) teach english words in one-to-one correspondence to chinese words this traditional translation teaching methods which has been adopted in china for a long time is considered to be helpful. but the long abusing of this method is harmful to the development of stu

40、dent language competence. take “milk” for example, the word “milk” in chinese culture refers to hot milk, because chinese people are used to drinking milk hot; while the word “milk” in american culture refers to cold milk, because american never drink boiled milk as we chinese do. in fact, many ling

41、uists believe that no word can be exactly translated into another language.3) treat all words equally the teachers imply that students should be able to produce all vocabulary presented. but it is suggested by the linguists that words can be classified into receptive vocabulary and productive vocabu

42、lary according to the needs. receptive vocabulary, although needed for comprehension, is not necessarily essential for production in speaking and writing. this method of vocabulary teaching adds much burden to students, and would cause them to become tired of vocabulary learning. 4) fail to follow t

43、he memory ruleaccording to the survey of linguists, the more times a word is used, the better you remember it. but many teachers partially emphasize the function of short-term memory. they pay more attention to the vocabulary inputting than remembering. being forced to remember a large amount of voc

44、abulary in this way, students are treated as if they were funned. in appearance they take in thousands of new words, but in effect only a few which are frequently used really stay in their store and can be exploited.5) harmful method of punishmentthe worst method of vocabulary teaching is the adopti

45、on of harmful method of punishmentcoping new words for 100 even 1000 times. there are still some teachers in favor of the copy method. this awkward punishment often cause students to fear and worry about english lessons. it is true that most of the middle school students are interested in english at

46、 first, but with the misuse of teaching methods by teachers, they might begin to feel discouraged in english learning and even disgust their english teacher.v. effective techniques of vocabulary teaching in middle school1. techniques of introducing new vocabulary vocabulary teaching is an art. if te

47、achers use suitable methods to teach students vocabulary, they may find that a little energy will bring good result. the introduction of new words is the first step for teachers to go on vocabulary teaching. so it seems to be more important about how to make your teaching successful? after observati

48、on of the vocabulary teaching in middle school, as well as with my experience of english learning, i would suggest some techniques of vocabulary teaching:1) using visualsvisual means that something is experienced by or connected with seeing. because children can not pay attention to the lesson for a

49、 long time, this method motivates students interest in english vocabulary learning. the teacher may use the objects to makes students recognize them. that is the most effective way for the learning beginners. show them objects such as labels, pictures, poster, magazine and so on in classroom before

50、you teach them the words. for example, if a lesson is about some fruits. the teacher can show students a picture which is drawn with many fruit. point to one of these fruits, then let them tell you the objects name in chinese and the teacher can tell the students the english word. this conversation

51、can be carried out following these sentences: teacher: “what is this in chinese/english?” students: “it is a pear.”teacher: “how to spell it?”students: “ p-e-a-r.”2) using gesturesgesture is widely used to communicate between people of different countries. its can show unclear expression to make peo

52、ple try to understand by themselves. of course, this method requires the teacher to perform before the students so as to make them study easily. the teacher should treat himself as a actor and students as audiences. for example, most action verbs such as smile, cry, eat, and so on. the teacher also

53、can put the separated word into a sentence. for example, the teacher is smiling. the teacher is eating.teacher: “look at me. what is the teacher doing?”(show the action of eating.)students: “the teacher is eating.”3) teaching series and word sequencessome of the words which are taught in elementary

54、language course occur naturally in sequence, such as numbers, names of months, days of the week. if we can put different words into one type following the sequence, vocabulary learning will no longer be so difficult. at the same time, the teachers also can use some objects to help students practice

55、the words in a series. many students find the numeral is so difficult to remember. according to this fact, the teacher can use clock face or calendar to practice the number for many times and summed up the easy way to remember them.4) using the known vocabulary sometimes teachers like to introduce s

56、ome difficult words to the students directly and only ask them to remember. this method may cause students to understand these words slowly. take “uncomfortable” for example, if the teacher introduces this word only by reading it, most students may consider it difficult. try the following wayusing t

57、he known vocabulary, the teacher can introduce this word by comparing it with its synonyms or antonyms (the students have learned.). for example, the room is so dirty and we are not comfortable to live in. according to this sentence, we may know that “uncomfortable” is the antonym of comfortable.5)

58、grouping many textbooks present vocabulary items in random order. some books have alphabetical lists of new words. but in order to make the slower students pass the difficulty, the teacher should prepare hangouts group words to help students remember them easily. for example, when they study the new words “blue, black, red”, the teach