The author hopes that after being taught by different ways, the students could find that the English word spelling regulation is similar to Chinese pinyin. If English underachievers could find the spelling rules by themselves, it’s possible for them to feel that learning English is not so difficult as they thought and at least they could handle the vocabulary part easily. In the paper, the author will illustrate how we can teach English underachievers to spell words in a correct way. If they can make some progress in vocabulary, to some extent, it will have a good impact on blank filling of their English tests, reading comprehension and written work, in the meantime, a good command of vocabulary will ease their mind, promote their interest in English learning and enhance the English learning incentive.

According to the New English Curriculum, English teaching objectives contain five aspects: language knowledge, language skills, learning strategies, affect and cultural awareness, which means that language knowledge and skills are of essence. Therefore, as one aspect of knowledge, vocabulary must be presented to students in an easily-absorbed way, and then they can develop skills and experience affect and cultural awareness. Human being’s language is based on the vocabulary, which consists of three basic language units—pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Grammar provides the overall patterns, and the vocabulary is the basic material to put into the patterns, cause there is no sentence, no essay, and even no language without vocabulary(Qi Pan, 2011). Thus, vocabulary teaching should be a field for research besides language skills.

There have been amounts of researches which aim at vocabulary teaching. For instance, Bafile (2003) argues that reading stories provide learners with an opportunity to see and hear vocabulary in a meaningful and memorable context. Stories give the learners an opportunity to infer the meanings of words that they do not know. As is suggested by Wen, first of all, we need to facilitate students to nurture interest in learning English(Wen Huaiying, 2014). When students start to form their learning incentive from interest, we can promote them to learning vocabulary in context rather than by definition.

As for English underachievers, there are several factors accounting for their bad performances in English class. Initially, they cannot keep focused and closely follow the teacher for a long time, or we can say, they are easily-distracted. Secondly, their English level doesn’t reach to certain level, which causes that there is a gap between their learned knowledge and new knowledge. That is to say, they have language cognition problem at certain stage. Thirdly, English underachievers don’t develop a good habit to learn English vocabulary. The study will aim to fill the gap between their learned knowledge and new knowledge and facilitate their language cognition.

Underachievers can be called problem students, which is mentioned by American experts to represent those who have difficulties in learning second language(Chen, Guo, 2006). Babanski argues that there are two kinds of factors for learning difficulty, internal factors and external ones. For internal factors, problem students don’t have a good mastery of language knowledge and skills, and some of them may encounter obstacles in the way of physical and mental development. For external ones, low quality of teaching, bad impact from the family and outside of the school are main two factors.

1.2 Content of the research

Therefore, combining vocabulary teaching and English underachievers, this paper aims at how to influence English underachievers in certain teaching strategy that they can accept more easily. Moreover, in-class and after-class teaching will be studied at the same time. In traditional classes, most teachers will choose to teach new words by using pictures to present new words directly without any consolidation. From my perspective, learning without consolidation may cause that some students cannot master words well in context and learn them difficultly after class. Therefore, helping those who cannot master words well in traditional classes is the main issue the author will study on from the view of teaching methodology. 英语学困生的单词教学策略的研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_55464.html