As far as primary English vocabulary teaching is concerned, in general, no matter whether its teaching objective is overall, periodical or even this teaching objective is specific to one unit or class, it is embodied in the following three aspects:
The first aspect is recognition. This kind of objective is categorized as the knowledge aim, referring to that one learner can recollect relevant information about one word when he or she sees it. The relevant information could be the word's meaning, usage, other related information and the strategy of learning it. Just take the word "like" as an example, its meaning is "be fond of", "having the same or some of the same characteristics" and so on. Its usage includes "like to do something", "like doing something", "be like", "look like", "would like to do something", etc. And its other related information are pronunciation, spelling, the third person singular form "likes", transitive verb or intransitive verb and so on. Besides, the learning strategy can be pided into synonym, antonym, association, collocation, classification, etc.
The second aspect is comprehension. The meaning of one word doesn't exist separately. On the contrary, one word's meaning changes according to different contexts. And in particular, the meaning of some phrase is not a simple combination of the meanings of every word which makes up the phrase. Moreover, the meaning of one word is not always limited to the definition listed in the dictionary. The pragmatic information should be drawn more attention from English vocabulary learners, and this point is of great importance to apply vocabulary.
The last aspect is application. The ultimate goal of vocabulary teaching and learning is that learners can be able to utilize vocabulary to convey information, express ideas, solve problems and fulfill a task. If a student cannot utilize target vocabulary to communicate, he or she cannot fulfill the tasks of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and the vocabulary teaching fails to accomplish its task that it should have completed. Therefore, the objective of vocabulary's application should always be seen as the ultimate purpose of English vocabulary learning. Moreover, in this aspect, students should also be taught to use some strategies to learn, memorize and apply new words (Wang Duqin, 2010, p.82).
2.2 Research Status on English Vocabulary Teaching
Virginia French Allen (2005) published a book called Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary, elaborating the techniques and methods for English learners in detail. In this book, Allen considers that all English learners can be pided into three different levels. The first level is the beginner. In this stage, beginners are advised to focus on the comprehension of vocabulary's meaning and its communicative role. The second level is the moderate learner. Here a good communicative context is emphasized. In the second stage, English vocabulary teaching should be inpidualized and the social meanings of target vocabulary should be paid more attention. The last one is the learner at advanced level. In the third stage, teachers should focus on the development of students' independent capability of vocabulary learning.
On the other hand, another book Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, writing by James Coady and Thomas Huckin (2001) also provides some theories about English vocabulary teaching. There are 14 essays in this book, claiming the great importance of elaborate arrangement of vocabulary teaching in class. What's more, a variety of vocabulary teaching methods are discussed. And the possible reasons why vocabulary teaching was neglected before and remedies to help solve these problems are explored and explained clearly.
So far, when it comes to specific articles about this research field in our country, we can roughly summarize them into three categories:
Firstly, the author selects the choice and arrangement of some specific teaching content in present primary English teaching material as the object of study and tries to reflect current educational philosophy and educational mode. In this way, the author can obtain some enlightenment in order to fully and better realize the function of some block designed in current teaching material. For example, the old textbook Oxford Primary English's each unit is made of several particular blocks. Among these teaching blocks, Block A serves as the subject section. And each block contains abundant topic vocabulary. Therefore, in practical teaching procedures, teachers should take the connections between blocks into consideration and fully encourage students to constitute a lexical chain which puts the semantic association as the center according to certain subject (Zhao Jiguo, 2012, p.55). 基于新《国家英语课程标准》小学英语词汇教学调查(4):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_20156.html