Discovering Techniques of Vocabulary Teaching in Middle Schools

hey do it in this way: “c-l-a-s-s-r-o-o-m, classroom” instead of “cl[kl]-a[a:]-ss[s]-r[r]-oo[u:]-m[m], classroom”. This stupid method adds the difficulty in memorizing new words. On the other hand, since the teachers do not ask students to notice the key parts of the new words, they meet much difficulty when remembering them; for example, when a teacher teach the word “mouth” and “month”, if he ask the students to pay attention to the key parts of these two words, and to underline “ou” in mouth with [au] above it and underline “on” in month with /^n/ above it, students would easily remember these two words without a mistake with their attentions to key parts. But many middle school English teachers, especially those in the non-standard ones lack in the study of pedagogy. They do not see the advantage of concentrating on key parts, that they arbitrarily require students to write down [    ]as well as machine completely and perfectly with the false belief that the more you can write down, the better you remember it. Finally, most students do not cooperate the functions of eyes, ears, mouth and hands when memorizing new words. Generally, a new word would well turn into an active one in students’ minds after at least three stages: The first stage is known as forming an acoustic link. That means students are able to link the pronunciation to the word when they hear it in a conversation. The second stage is probably forming a usual link. That is to say, when students come across this word in reading materials, they can understand it. The third stage is more difficult to achieve but very important. It is to form mental image of the word. That means they can imitate, choose and give the reign to it freely and accurately in speaking and writing as if it is their native word. Most students can only achieve the first and second stages but never reach the third stage partly due to their poor cooperation of the sense organs.
v. Fail to follow the memory rule：
There are two types of memory processes---short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory means that the storation of input only stay in your memory temporarily; while the long-term memory means the storation of input can stay in your memory for more than 10 days, ever for the whole life. In fact, our memory process is a recycling process. According to the survey of linguists, the more times the word is used, the better you remember it. But many teachers partially emphasize the function of short-term memory. They seem to care more about the amount of vocabulary input than those actually stay in students’ memory.
Being forced to remember a large amount of vocabulary in this way, students are treated as if they were a funned. In appearance they take in thousands of new words, but in effect only a few which are frequently used really stay in their store and can be exploited. It is not amazing that a senior middle school student who is required to master 3000 words has misused or made mistakes in 60 words when asked to write down a passage of 100 words because of his poor vocabulary storation. Many of teachers put all the blame to the students’ laziness. They explain for themselves that those students are too lazy to enlarge their size of vocabulary.
There might be some teachers seeing the long-term memory rule. However, they never succeed in applying the memory rule in classroom. They claim that the time of each period of class is limited that they can’t spend so much time on the repetition of vocabulary teaching. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think their excuses make any sense. What matters is their ignorance of scientific teaching techniques and irresponsibility for the development of students.
vi. Harmful method of punishment：
I think the worst method of vocabulary teaching is the adoption of harmful method of punishment---copying new words for 100 even 1000 times. There are still some teachers in favor of the copy method. These teachers force their poor students to copy many times of new words which they make mistakes in. This awkward punishment often cause students to fear and worry about English lessons. It is true that most of the middle school students are interested in English at first, because it is a new subject that is full of novelty and interest. And they like their English teacher, too. But with the misuse of teaching methods by teachers, they might begin to feel discouraged in English learning and even disgust their English teacher.
The six traditional methods of vocabulary teaching which I have mentioned  are frequently used by many middle school English teachers, especially those working in common middle schools in rural areas where teacher-dominant classes are typical. Being taught in these ways, although students take painful efforts in vocabulary learning, they achieve little. As a result, they can’t find much pleasure in English and become more and more lazy in study. Not only are their English ability not improved, but the