And for most students, they can learn by themselves, however, for those underachievers, they need more help from the teacher. The author will dedicate to applying main vocabulary teaching strategies on the English underachievers and try to find out the most efficient ones.
2.Literature Review
In this chapter, the author will introduce several researches about vocabulary and vocabulary teaching in different periods. Moreover, English underachievers will be introduced and illustrated after vocabulary teaching methods. According to learners’ cognition, the author will make an analysis between English underachievers and vocabulary teaching.
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.
2.1 Vocabulary knowledge
In vocabulary teaching researches, vocabulary knowledge can be pided into internal knowledge and external knowledge, including the definition or conceptual meaning, its grammar, connotations, pragmatic rules and the socio-cultural message it carries. Vocabulary does not only refer to the single words but also the ―chunks such as phrases and idioms(Qi Pan & Runjiang Xu, 2011).
2.1.1 Pronunciation and Spelling
In Standard pronunciation and correct spelling are the essential parts of vocabulary teaching and learning. The college students have to know what a word sounds like (pronunciation) and what it looks like (spelling). When teaching vocabulary, teachers should draw them attention to pronunciation and spelling together, and clarify the relationships between them.源`自·优尔~文;论:文'网[www.youerw.com
2.1.2 Grammar
The grammar of new vocabulary will need to be taught if this is not obviously covered by general grammatical rules. An English word may have an unpredictable change of form in certain grammatical contexts or may have some idiosyncratic way of connecting with other words in sentences. For example, when teaching a new verb, teachers should give its past form if this verb is irregular (forbid, forbade), and teachers might note if it is transitive or intransitive. Similarly, when teaching a noun, teachers need to present its plural form if the noun is irregular (criterion, criteria), or draw them attention to the fact that it has no plural at all (people).
2.1.3 Word Formation
Vocabulary items, whether one-word or multi-word, can often be split into their component bits, and how these bits put together is another piece of useful information which may be worth teaching. If students know the meaning of sub-, un-, and –able, this will help them to guess the meaning of words like substandard, ungrateful and renewable(Qi Pan & Runjiang Xu, 2011).
2.2 Vocabulary teaching strategies
2.2.1 Teaching vocabulary in context
In relation to vocabulary teaching, researchers suggest that teaching new vocabulary should begin with presenting the new items in context and then the learners should be given the opportunity of dealing with words out of context (Palmberg, 1988). It is important to provide learners with strategies for inferring the meaning of unknown vocabulary from the context in which it occurs instead of getting them to memorize long lists of words or look up unknown words in a dictionary which would make the reading process slow and tedious and which would probably not contribute to the actual learning of vocabulary(Hatime, Sema, 2009). 英语学困生的单词教学策略的研究(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_55464.html