Since the beginning of economic globalization, people have realized thesignificance of the language that is used among the majority of the nations in theworld. Due to the great influence of the English-speaking countries, English has beenused almost all over the world. This language has been used in a variety of occasionssuch as international conferences, traveling in other countries, learning about foreignculture so on and so forth. In order to get used to the trend of globalization, peoplerealized the importance of learning English and made emitting efforts to grasp thelanguage. Due to the great gap between the Chinese and English, most Chinese hadgreat difficulty in learning the vocabularies and the pronunciations. Besides, it is verydifficult for Chinese learners to master the complex grammars and to speak thelanguage as if speaking the mother tongue. The resource of the difficulties in speakingEnglish is that Chinese have difficulties in learning the vocabularies as well as theusage of the words. Realizing such a fact, the English teachers started to attach greatsignificance of vocabulary teaching. In addition to the teachers, the department ofeducation also paid much attention to English teaching and required that Englishshould be taught as one of the most important subjects in middle and senior highschool. Besides, the perfect mark of English test in the entrance examination ofuniversity is 150 points so that both teachers and students regarded them as the mostimportant and difficult subject. Besides, due to the limitation of time in Englishclasses, students have limited access to English-speaking practice. As a result,students always complained that it is difficult to reach a high score in English testsand to speak English fluently. As a result, it is still of great significance to investigatemore efficient methods applicable for English teaching.
......Chapter 2. Literature Review
2.1 Previous ResearchesAbroad about Vocabulary Teaching
Before 19thcentury, there were no teaching methods that were used among alllanguage classes and the teachers then focused more on teaching students to readmore books in other languages, instead of communicating with others. At that time,grammar-translation method was more famous among language teachers. Applyingthis method, the teacher tended to follow the steps of reviewing words learned in thelast class, presenting new words, explaining grammars, analyzing the texts, reviewingthe teaching content and making assignment for homework. It is obvious that theteachers pay more attention to the teaching content, instead of the students, but thismethod was so influential that it is still used in today’s language classes.After 19thcentury, direct teaching method started to become famous. Thismethod refers to the one that the teachers make use of pictures or body languages topresent the meanings of words. This method was extremely useful for teachingobscure words since it helped language learners connect the words with the real world.As a result, even the obscure words could leave a deep impression on them.However, such a method was not useful when the teacher was required to teach someobscure words such as functional words. Even though direct method was not perfect,it was still one of the most important method employed in language teaching.2.2 Previous Researches in China about Vocabulary Teaching
Compared with the western studies about vocabulary learning and teaching, thestudies about this topic in China are less creative but the advantages lies in that thestudies are more application-oriented and are even more useful for the languageteaching and learning. The vocabulary teaching in China started from the time whenthe English course was set up in Chinese schools. At the beginning, English learningis extremely difficult for Chinese learners since Chinese and English belonged todifferent linguistic branches: English belongs to the West-Germanic family whileChinese belongs to
