建构主义理论在中学英语词汇教学中的应用(2)

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In addition, vocabulary teaching in middle school usually tends to interpret the words in isolation, thus it ignores the creation of context. In traditional teaching, some teachers teach nearly every word that exists in the word list. For convenience, some teachers haven’t taken the context into consideration and they explain a word out of the context, which makes some teachers become the “experts” of dictionaries. This method that advocates the teaching without the context lets many students feel that learning vocabulary is boring and lets them lost interest in learning vocabulary.

What’s more, vocabulary teaching, a basic part of middle school English teaching, often attaches more significance to the literal meaning of vocabulary, thus it ignores the cultural connotation of words. Because language is closely connected with culture, it is impossible to grasp and use the national language accurately without the culture of a nation. In class, some teachers only explain the literal meaning of words rather than introducing the corresponding cultural connotation. As a result, this practice makes students learn a little knowledge and can not master the language very well.源]自[751^`论\文"网·www.751com.cn/

Finally, English vocabulary teaching of middle school lays stress on the mechanical memorizing, thus ignores the method of interesting memory. In class, some teachers directly teach many words and then let students recite these words after class. And they seldom apply the methods that can make the students memory more efficient. Therefore, students are prone to be whiny during the process of mechanical memorizing, meanwhile, vocabulary teaching is hardly to achieve a success.

In order to avoid the above questions, this paper tries to explore the middle school English vocabulary teaching on the basis of constructivism theory. And the theme of this paper can lead a new round of reform in the middle school English vocabulary teaching, which can let the vocabulary learning become more efficient and interesting, thus enable students to learn English very well.

2. Literature Review

Vocabulary teaching is very significant in middle school English teaching. At present, many scholars have done a lot of researches and obtained a lot of achievements from different angles in this respect. There are some scholars who have put forward that teachers can apply the theory of semantic field to the middle school vocabulary teaching. They pointed out “the theory of semantic field is an important theory of linguistics, and it emphasizes the mutual contact of different words on the meaning. And this inner connection enables different words to constitute the same semantic field. Therefore, the vocabulary teaching modes that guided by the theory of semantic field can improve the efficiency of English vocabulary learning to a certain degree.” There are also some scholars who hold that the theory of double code can benefit the English vocabulary teaching, which can improve the effect of long-term memory, thus helps students learn the English vocabulary very well. In addition, some other scholars point out that the conceptual blending theory can also do a favor in the improvement of vocabulary teaching.(Tian et al) In general, although their views are presented from different aspects of second language acquisition, they all hope to improve the current situation of middle school English vocabulary teaching.

Constructivism theory emphasizes that knowledge is obtained by the initiative construction of students and some other conditions, such as certain contexts and the use of necessary learning materials. Acquiring knowledge depends on students themselves rather than teachers. Therefore, based on the constructivism theory, the middle school English vocabulary teaching should be student-centered, emphasizing the active role of students, meanwhile, vocabulary teaching should try to pay more attention to the importance of situation teaching.