Effectiveness of Context-Based Strategy for English Learning among Chinese Middle School Students

Abstract

Currently, a growing number of educators are aware of the need to look for new approaches to replace the “spoon-feeding” method. Therefore, the context-based strategy began to emerge. This study aims to investigate how students derive information through contextual clues by examining the progress of Chinese middle school EFL students in terms of word recognition. The participants of this study included 20 eighth grade students from the same middle school. The participants sat for two different quizzes: a contextual vocabulary quiz (quiz A) and a direct instruction quiz (quiz B). In quiz A, the participants inferred the meaning of the target words from the example sentences, whereas in quiz B, the students utilized the accompanying English explanation to guess other new words. These students were in the experimental and control conditions, respectively. The two quizzes comprised of 15 multiple choice questions (MCQ) which differentiated the participants’ word recognition response to two different learning methods. There were two significant findings from this study. First, the results showed that the context-based strategy leads to a better vocabulary learning performance compared to the direct instruction strategy. Second, although it is not as effective as the context-based strategy, the direct instruction strategy may assist EFL learners in remembering words in short term.

Exploring the Efficiency of Associative Vocabulary Teaching Strategies to Foreign Language Learners

“…In other words, vocabulary knowledge is enhanced in a prominent way during the sessions of applying the related concept maps for the target lexical items (Thornbury, 2002). In effect, a concept map was found to be a useful strategy to produce and generate new semantic networks, new ideas, organize complex structures, accelerate the communication performance and process, and provide an effective learning atmosphere and environment by integrating old and new lexical schemata (Luo and Chen, 2021 Overall, considering the fact that EFL learners would acquire the target lexical items in relation to other semantically-related items under the influence of associative vocabulary teaching strategies unlike the traditional strategies, they can retrieve the target words more efficiently in all language-related comprehension and production tasks and consequently the rate and the quantity of the learnt items in addition to their functional awareness would increase. As Liu (2016) claimed, "students' divergent thinking ability can be improved through association ability" (p. 226).…”