English Drill for Middle School Pack 1 - Vocabulary Teaching

An English famous linguist Wilkins said: "without grammar, little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed". It can be seen that as one of the three basic language units (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar), vocabulary plays an important role.
It is about the meanings of words and how the words are used. In the process of learning English, the most difficult issue facing middle school students is the lack of vocabulary. The importance of vocabulary decides that vocabulary teaching is an indispensable part of English curriculum. But some traditional vocabulary-teaching methods seem to isolate words from the context or break away from the scientific rules, in that way, they cannot help students to develop language competence in the long run but cause them to lose interest in English.

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Middle school English teachers are the premier ones who introduce students to the field of English, thus they should take great responsibility for this. To realize why vocabulary teaching is important in middle schools and find scientific methods to improve English teaching is necessary.
D.A.Wilkins, a famous British linguist, once said: "Without grammar we can convey a little, but without vocabulary we can convey nothing." Some studies also reveal that students with good grammar and large vocabulary can do much better than those with good grammar but little vocabulary.
In China, however, English teachers sometimes tend to overlook the importance of the lexical system and neglect the vocabulary teaching, which is especially obvious in middle-schools.
Lexical items may also have appeared to be of secondary importance because they have sometimes been seen as that which is used to "flesh out" the structure or to exemplify parts of the sound system. However, words are the basic of language and without lexicon the major meaning-caring element in language is missing.
The following part will analyze from two aspects: six main drawbacks of the present vocabulary teaching, and three distinguishing features of English words and some scientific techniques for middle school teachers to teach students.