Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background
English is an important subject of study in China's high school curriculum. To gainadmission to colleges or universities，英语毕业论文，high school graduates (seniors) are required to takenational entrance examinations in the so-called 3 main subjects -Chinese language &literature，mathematics and English. Of the 3 main subject exams，English exam is thoughtby most seniors to be the most difficult one. The points they get in English exam are，moreoften than not，unsatisfied and thus make the total achievement points in the nationalentrance examinations hardly up to the ideal level. The basic reasons why some seniorsfail the English exam in the national entrance examinations are ascertainable from theirEnglish learning methodology as well as from the existing problems in high schoolEnglish teaching. For quite a number of years，the author has been teaching English to thehigh school seniors in Taiyuan New Oriental School(新东方培训学校)，the biggest andmost popular school run by social forces. By analyzing the results of so many years'English exams given to the high school seniors of all previous years，the author finds thatthe most crucial problem confronting them is not grammar knowledge but vocabularydevelopment. Their vocabulary is too small to cope with the examination. More than oncethe author used written questionnaires to ask her students about how they commonly learnEnglish vocabulary and what method they usually use to memorize English words. Theanswers the author got from them were surprisingly unanimous and consistent. Theoverwhelming majority of them used and are still using "learning by rote" metiiod(死记硬背法)to develop their English vocabularies.
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1.2 Trends of thoughts on vocabulary learning and teaching
Vocabulary research was considered central to early development in the profession ofEnglish language teaching and after that remained a neglected aspect of language learning(Carter, 1987; Levenston，1979; Meara，1980，1983). For many years，vocabulary was onlyseen as incidental to the main purpose of language teaching — namely the acquisition ofgrammatical knowledge about the language. Vocabulary research has long been subsumedwithin other fields，for example，within the study of reading in a foreign language，or withinwriting or as part of second language acquisition more generally conceived (Carter &McCarthy，1988). Vocabulary was considered necessary to give students something to hangonto when learning structures，英语论文题目，but was frequently not a main focus for learning itself. Recently, however, linguists have increasingly been turning their attention to vocabulary，stressing its importance in language learning and teaching and evaluating some of the ways inwhich it is taught and leamt.Development in the vocabulary instruction, as Carter and McCarthy (1988) explained,have been marked by several trends of thoughts. Early statements in research on L2vocabulary teaching voiced concerns for making the task of vocabulary learning moremanageable for learners through efforts to limit the vocabulary taught in L2 classes. Then itwas recognized that learners must develop language vocabularies in order to becomeproficient in the L2，which led to the belief that classroom instruction ought to focus onincreasing learners' vocabularies. Further more，it was suggested that efforts should also bedirecte
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