Techniques of Vocabulary Teaching in Middle School

1、中学英语词汇教学技巧探究techniques of vocabulary teaching in middle schoolcontentsabstract.1key words.1i. introduction.2 ii. the importance of vocabulary teaching in middle school2iii. the drawbacks of several traditional vocabulary teaching methods3 1. teaching words in one-to-one correspondence to chinese wor

2、ds.4 2. treat all words equally.4 3. teach words in isolation.4 4. fail to follow the memory rule.5 5. students metal disorder.5 6. mechanization reviews.6 iv. the characteristics of english words.7 1. the pronunciation of each word match its spelling.7 2. more than one meaning.7 3. varieties of the

3、ir shape and their grammatical values.7v. techniques of vocabulary teaching.8 1. role play8 2. visual teaching aid to teach english words.8 3. using known vocabulary.9 4. categories10 5. teaching vocabulary in context.11vi. conclusion.11references12abstract: vocabulary teaching is one of the key lin

4、ks in the middle school english teaching. as d.a.wilkins in his book linguistics in language teaching, said, without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. vocabulary teaching is an indispensable part of english curriculum. but some traditional vocabulary-te

5、aching methods seem to isolate the words from the context or break away from the scientific rules. so, this article analyzes briefly the vocabulary teaching in middle school. when teaching vocabulary，the teacher should try to make students connect words and concepts by the means of visual-aids，trans

6、lation，words formation，paraphrasing，categories，synonyms，antonyms，guessing the meanings of words from contexts and so on the teacher also must help his students to memorize words by spelling，comprehension and review key words: vocabulary teaching；drawback；teaching techniques摘 要：词汇教学是中学英语教学中的一个关键。正如语言

7、学家威尔金斯在他的书语言教学中的语言学中提到，没有语法，能表达的内容很少；没有词汇，则什么都表达不了。词汇教学是英语教学中不可或缺的一部分。一些中学英语教师在讲授词汇时，把词汇从上下文中脱离出来，忽略了科学的学习规律。因此，这篇文章给我们简单的分析了中学的词汇教学。当我们教词汇时，老师应该努力使学生把单词和概念联系起来，通过可视的辅助工具，翻译，词汇的背景信息，分类，同义词，近义词，从上下文中猜测词义等等各种有效方法。老师务必使学生通过拼写，理解，回顾等方法记住单词。关键字: 词汇教学；教学难点；教学技巧i. introduction as everyone knows, the classr

8、oom teaching is one of the most important ways that the students learn english. recently, the science of education has developed rapidly; meanwhile, a reform of teaching method has swept across china. some authorities and schools have more and more emphasized teaching method, and even taken it as an

9、 important optional component of the estimation of teaching standard. with that influence, more and more teachers have taken more attention to teaching method as almost the initial part of their teaching lives. as far as the english teaching in the middle schools is concerned, teachers have to arous

10、e the students interest so that they may learn better. vocabulary, the building material of language, together with pronunciation and grammar, constitutes the three essential elements of language. in the three essential factors, the vocabulary is a foundation of language learning. without a solid fo

11、undation of vocabulary, “the five skills(listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation) prescribed in the curriculum are nothing but castle in the air. therefore, the acquisition of vocabulary is an integral part of english teaching. so, how to teach english in middle school directly affect

12、the students use english to communicate maturely and freely.but, in china, english teachers have sometimes tended to overlook the importance of vocabulary teaching. this is an obvious phenomenon especially in middle school. this phenomenon might have resulted from the fact that linguists have worked

13、 out a perfect equivalent chinese vocabulary to english system, so teachers and students can more easily deal with the vocabulary than with the grammar and sound of english words which are quite different from the chinese grammar and sound (he jiaqi, 2003). ii. the importance of vocabulary teaching

14、in middle schoolvocabulary is one of three essential elements (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar) in the language learning. in the long run, many schools and linguistics always attend to research on the effective methods of vocabulary learning. in the end of 19th century, direct method began to

15、be popular. concrete vocabulary makes use of the relationship such as: graphs, charts, action and vocabulary meaning. abstract vocabulary is the use of traditional distinguish and image. because of the influences of the direct method, there is reading method in the u.s. in the 1920s, whose aim is to

16、 improve the level of vocabulary through reading. michael west thought we should accord with word-frequency list when we make up teaching material. in the same phase, h. e. palmer and a. s. hornby put forward situational language teaching.meanwhile, the vocabulary teaching was considered to be a ver

17、y important part of a foreign language teaching, but building up the vocabulary through vocabulary teaching is a kind of science reasonable choice method. during world war ii, in the basis of structural linguistics and behavior psychologist, audio-lingual method was built. it emphasized on pronuncia

18、tion and the oral communication of basic sentence structure.many teachers know that vocabulary teaching is the primary and essential part of english teaching. this is because we cannot express anything perfectly without vocabulary; we cannot carry on the basic language communication such as listenin

19、g, speaking, reading, writing and translation if there is no vocabulary. we need to have a store of vocabulary from which we can select freely when we wish to express our thoughts. for students, mastering a certain number of vocabulary is the key to learn english. as everyone knows, the more vocabul

20、ary one masters, the stronger skill in applying language he/she will have. but to our chinese students, the vocabulary learning is a great difficulty in english learning. what is more, many students always consider that vocabulary learning is to recite the words which appeared in the text. they thin

21、k that if they can remember all those words, they will finish their vocabulary learning. as a matter of fact, vocabulary learning still stays in the combination of “pronunciation, the spelling and meaning, and almost all their time and energy are used in these three parts. this will bring failures t

22、o them in learning and communication. thus, the teachers teaching methods of vocabulary becomes especially important. especially in middle school, it is the beginning of english learning .if methods are suitable for the students and beneficial for them in the long run, they could arouse students int

23、erest in english and help them to develop a solid foundation of language acquisition ability. whereas if he fails to do so, it might cause them to disgust english. the purpose of teaching vocabulary is to make the students master the vocabulary, use the vocabulary freely and lay the base for their e

24、nglish learning. so, many linguistics and schools have been researching the approaches of english teaching.iii. the drawbacks of several traditional vocabulary teaching methods the traditional english vocabulary teaching is a duck-stuffing way. it only needs teachers mouths and pieces of chalks. the

25、 students just act as receivers of knowledge. this kind of teaching greatly prevents the students initiative in learning. and this is not the teaching aims. what the teacher should do is to try his/her best to wake up the students initiative and interests in learning. now, i will analyzes problems o

26、f the traditional methods of teaching vocabulary.1. teaching words in one-to-one correspondence to chinese wordsin china, many traditional english teachers teach english words in one-to-one correspondence to chinese words. this traditional teaching method which has been adopted in china for a long t

27、ime is considered to be helpful. but in the long run, this method is harmful to the development of the students language ability. especially in the elementary stage, this method should be avoided as possible as it can be.when students say that they know the meaning of an english word, they usually m

28、ean that they have found a chinese word equivalent, but this equivalent word may be misleading. in fact, some linguistics believed that no words can be exactly translated into another language. learning the words of english is not just to memorize their general meaning, but to learn the meaning with

29、in the context of culture life.2. treat all words equallytreat all words equally, this obtains two meanings. one is to treat all words the same, was without who is important or who is light. it keeps balance between key words and light. another is to treat all meaning of word equally. as we known, m

30、ost english words have not just one meaning in the english. in many meanings and usages, they also have difference between main and light. of course, for many words, we can classify them into receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary according to the needs, language levels and professions of th

31、e learners. all speakers are able to recognize more words than they usually use on a productive level. productive vocabulary is utilized in everyday speech. on the other hand, receptive vocabulary is not necessarily essential for production in speaking and writing. teachers who do notice this fact a

32、sk students to concentrate equally on the acquisition of both receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. this adds much burden to students to treat all words equally, and would cause them to become tired of vocabulary learning. in fact, every word needs not to memorize fully, some word you can

33、only read. some words you not only master their pronunciation but also know their usages.3. teach words in isolationmiddle school english teachers in china usually ask students to learn vocabulary lists in which words are isolated from the context. this teaching method implies that learning vocabula

34、ry means learning dividable word at a time. however, the relationships between words are as important as the meaning of the word in isolation, for example, how “car contrasts with “bus” and how it is related to driver and engine. the relationship of those words is as important as the word itself. ma

35、ny middle school students often make such sentence as:1) the police adopted by the chinese communist party is beneficial.2) my spoken-english is very bad. students make such sentences, they only know the meaning of each individual word, but they are poor in the proper use of “beneficial” ( policies

36、take many beneficial for people) and bad(which should be changed into poor).4. fail to follow the memory rulethere are two types of memory processes. one is short-term memory and another is long-term memory. short-term memory means that the starvation of input only stay in your memory temporarily; w

37、hile the long-term memory means the starvation of input can stay in your memory for more than 10 days, ever for the whole life.( shao runzhen, 1990)in fact, our memory process is a recycling process. according to the survey of linguists, the more times the word is used, the better you remember it. b

38、ut many teachers partially emphasize the function of short-term memory. they seem to care more about the amount of vocabulary input than those actually stay in students memory.students were forced to remember a large amount of vocabulary by short-term memory. after they have just read words, maybe,

39、they can remember it clearly. but in the long run, they also forget it quickly as remember it. only a few words which are frequently used really stay in their store and can be exploited. so, when middle school student is asked to write down a passage of 60 words, he can make 20 words mistake. his po

40、or vocabulary starvation caused this phenomenon. many teachers put all blame to students laziness. they are not taking their responsibility.maybe, some teachers can see the long-term memory rule. but, they never succeed in applying the memory rule in classroom. they explain that the time of the less

41、on is limited; they cant spend so much time on vocabulary teaching. as far as i am concerned, i think their excuses are excuses, not have any sense. maybe, they did not know how to teach student to remember vocabulary efficiently at all. 5. students metal disorderas jia guanjie said, some students t

42、hought that learning vocabulary is a simple thing, only to spend some free time to recite. in fact, learning vocabulary is not only to learn pronunciation, structure, but also to remember this word in any time. we should identify and make use of it expertly in the speech and the written language. be

43、cause students did not understand words meaning fully, it caused the student to produce despise mental state and lack of the hardship. if the time is long, student will feel that study vocabulary is tedious, they will lose interest in vocabulary learning, and they will even produce tedium mentality.

44、 especially forgetting some words which they have been learning, it is easily to produce worry and fear metal state. in addition, the middle school students learn english in the foundation of master certain mother tongue. they usually make use of chinese phrases to learn english phrases, express eng

45、lish with the way of the chinese language, all these mental obstacles hinder and interfere the english vocabulary learning. 6. mechanization reviews to learn a lesson or a unit, many teachers usually require a student to practice new words ten times and more. here are still some teachers in favor of

46、 the copy method. these teachers force their poor students to copy many times of new words which they make mistakes in writing. this awkward punishment often cause students to fear and worry about english lessons. this way escapes from the context completely. this make vocabulary learning mechanize.

47、 even students remembered words quickly at that time, they will also forget them very quickly, even if they remember them, they cant use them flexibly.in the middle school, students are interested in english at first, if teachers teach it in the incorrect teaching methods, they might begin to feel d

48、iscouraged in english learning and even disgust their english teacher.six incorrect method of vocabulary teaching and learning which i mentioned are frequently used by many middle school english teachers, especially in rural middle schools where teachers position is key or dominant in the classroom.

49、 being taught in these traditional ways, they achieve little, although students take painful efforts in vocabulary learning. as a result, they can not have happiness in english and become lazier in study. not only are their english ability unimproved, but they are discouraged in english learning.iv.

50、 the characteristics of english words every thing has its features. when we discuss how to teach english words effectively, we had better know about the characteristics of english words. english words are quite different from chinese characters. english words have three features. 1. the pronunciatio

51、n of each word match its spellingthe pronunciation of each word is corresponded to its spelling, for example, look at the following two lists of words:1) by, try, sky, cry, fly ai 2) smart, artist, mark, garden a: in list 1) the letter “y” in the five words are all pronounced as ai ; and in list 2)

52、the letter combination “ar” in the four words are pronounced as a: . if students have noticed this relationship between english pronunciation and their spelling, they will be easier to pronounce and memorize new words. of course, some words have some special pronunciations, do not observe this rule.

53、2. more than one meaningthe second feature of english words is that they frequently have more than one meaning. such as, “well”, if it is a adverb, it means ok or only to catch others attention; if it is a noun, it is an underground source that give much water to people to drink. when we come across

54、 a word, then, and try to guess its meaning we will have to look at the context in which it is used. for example, when a man said to a woman that:well, thank you!now, this “well” is an adverb.so, students need to understand the importance of meaning in context.3. varieties of their shape and their g

55、rammatical valuesenglish words can change their shape and their grammatical values, too. students need to know facts about word formation and how to twist words to fit different grammar. thus the verb “run” has the participles “running” and past participle “run”, the present participle “running” can

56、 be used as an adjective and “run” can also be a noun. there is a clear relationship between the words “death”, “dead”, “dying” and “die”. students also need to know how suffixes and prefixes work. if they master them, they will easily memorize english words.v. techniques of vocabulary teachingwheth

57、er a middle school english teacher can follow scientific methods to teach vocabulary or not they would directly bring good or bad influence on the students. middle school is the beginning of english teaching; english teacher should estimate students interest in learning english. but vocabulary teaching is one of the keys in teaching english. following, i will show some scientific methods to teach english words, i hope that they can be beneficial to both teachers and students in middle school. 1. role playthis kind of method is to use th