Discovering Techniques of Vocabulary Teaching in Middle Schools

y are discouraged in English learning.
It is particularly important and necessary to try to make vocabulary teaching interesting and affective for the students. Their study will become a lot more effective if the students come to the classroom willingly instead of being forced to. That is to say, how can teachers succeed in arousing the students’ interest in English and making the students more active and aggressive in thinking by vocabulary teaching? To do so we should discard the drawbacks of traditional vocabulary teaching methods, reserve their advantages and combine them with scientific vocabulary teaching theories. But how?

III.  Three distinguishing features of English vocabulary and 11 scientific techniques to teach them:
3.1. The there distinguishing features of English vocabulary:
Before studying the better techniques in vocabulary teaching, we had better know about the characteristics of English words. English words are quite different from Chinese characters, the former one is a spelling system while the later is a stroke system. English words have three distinguishing features:
i. Firstly, the pronunciation of each word is corresponded to its spelling, for example, look at the following two lists of words:
①old, cold, hold, whole, so    [  ]
②smart, artist, mark, garden   [a: ]
In list① the letter “o” in the five words are all pronounced as [  ]; and in list② the letter combination “ar” in the four words are pronounced as [a: ]. If students have noticed this relationship between English pronunciation and spelling, they would be easier in pronouncing and memorizing new words.
But with a long history of development and variation, and with the influence by other languages, the spelling of English words don’t always observe this rule; for example, the letter “u” is pronounced differently in the following words:
Uncle[  ], until[  ], full[  ], music[  ], truth[  ]
In another case, with the influence of American accent, the word “clerk [    ]” is also pronounced as [    ].
ii. Another feature of English words is that they frequently have more than one meaning. The word “book”, for example, obviously refers to something you use to read from (a written work in the form of ) a set of printed pages fastened together inside a cover, as a thing to be read. According to one learner’s dictionary. But the same dictionary then goes on to list eight more meanings of “book” as a noun, two meanings of “book” as a verb and three meanings where “book” + preposition makes phrasal verbs. So we will have to say that the word “book” sometimes means the kind of thing you read from, but it can also mean a number of other things.
When we come across a word, then, and try to decipher its meaning we will have to look at the context in which it is used. If we see a woman in a theatre arguing at the ticket office saying, “But I booked my rickets three weeks ago.” we will obviously understand a meaning of the verb “book” which is different from a policeman (accompanied by an unhappy-looking man at a police station) saying to his colleague “we booked him for speeding.” In other words, students need to understand the importance of meaning in context.
iii. The third characteristic is that English words can change their shape and their grammatical values, too. Students need to know facts about word formation and how to twist words to fit different grammatical contexts. Thus the verb “run” has the participles “running” and “ran”, the present participle “running” can be used as an adjective and “run” can also be a none. There is a clear relationship between the words “death”, “dead”, “dying” and “die”.
Students also need to know how suffixes and prefixes work. How can we make the words potent and expensive opposite in meaning? Why do we preface one with in- and the other with im-?
Knowing the three distinguishing characteristics of English vocabulary will help teachers to deliver vocabulary teaching.
3.2. Eleven scientific techniques to teach English vocabulary:
After careful observation of the middle school English classroom and the study of pedagogy in the aspect of English teaching, as well as with my personal experience of English learning, I would like to suggest 11 techniques of vocabulary- teaching which I consider would be valuable for both teachers and students in middle schools:
i. Using visuals:
1). Labels: For a beginning class the teacher can prepare labels for objects in the classroom; for example, in the classroom the door might have a label reading “CLASS TWO”; above the chalkboard might be a sign saying “STUDY HARD”.
2). Magazine pictures: The teacher cuts out magazine pictures that illustrate words in a dialogue or basic sentences. These are placed on the chalkboard or on a magnetic board with magnets. The teacher points to the objects and gives their foreign language equivalents: This is a restaurant.
3). Props: If the lesson is about foods, the teacher could bring to class a basket of plastic fruit.
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