imes. There are still some teachers in favor of the copy method. These teachers force their poor students to copy many times of new words which they make mistakes in. 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 first, because it is a new subject that is full of novelty and interest. And they like their English teacher, too. But with the misuse of teaching methods by teachers, they might begin to feel discouraged in English learning and even disgust their English teacher.
The six traditional methods of vocabulary teaching which I have mentioned are frequently used by many middle school English teachers, especially those working in common middle schools in rural areas where teacher-dominant classes are typical. Being taught in these ways, although students take painful efforts in vocabulary learning, they achieve little. As a result, they can’t find much pleasure in English and become more and more lazy in study. Not only are their English ability not improved, but they are discouraged in English learning.
It is particularly important and necessary to try to make vocabulary teaching interesting and affective for the students. Their study will become a lot more effective if the students come to the classroom willingly instead of being forced to. That is to say, how can teachers succeed in arousing the students’ interest in English and making the students more active and aggressive in thinking by vocabulary teaching? To do so we should discard the drawbacks of traditional vocabulary teaching methods, reserve their advantages and combine them with scientific vocabulary teaching theories. But how?[NextPage]
III. Three distinguishing features of English vocabulary and 11 scientific techniques to teach them:
3.1. The there distinguishing features of English vocabulary:
Before studying the better techniques in vocabulary teaching, we had better know about the characteristics of English words. English words are quite different from Chinese characters, the former one is a spelling system while the later is a stroke system. English words have three distinguishing features:
i. Firstly, the pronunciation of each word is corresponded to its spelling, for example, look at the following two lists of words:
①old, cold, hold, whole, so [ ]
②smart, artist, mark, garden [a: ]
In list① the letter “o” in the five words are all pronounced as [ ]; and in list② the letter combination “ar” in the four words are pronounced as [a: ]. If students have noticed this relationship between English pronunciation and spelling, they would be easier in pronouncing and memorizing new words.
But with a long history of development and variation, and with the influence by other languages, the spelling of English words don’t always observe this rule; for example, the letter “u” is pronounced differently in the following words:
Uncle[ ], until[ ], full[ ], music[ ], truth[ ]
In another case, with the influence of American accent, the word “clerk [ ]” is also pronounced as [ ].
ii. Another feature of English words is that they frequently have more than one meaning. The word “book”, for example, obviously refers to something you use to read from (a written work in the form of ) a set of
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