Abstract

For Chinese EFL students, there are many ways to acquire vocabulary, among which contextual vocabulary acquisition is one of the most efficient. This paper mainly discusses the advantages of contextual vocabulary acquisition and the ways to acquire vocabulary through contexts of words, including collocational contexts, affixational contexts and associational contexts, and through actual speech contexts, including issues concerning the speaker’s psychology, cultural differences and inequivalence between Chinese and English. As the results have shown，a good understanding of different context clues and a good mastery of techniques on how to acquire vocabulary through contexts will make vocabulary acquisition more efficient and fruitful..

Key words: vocabulary acquisition through context, context of words, actual speech context，efficiency

摘要

对中国的英语词汇学习者来说，习得词汇的方法很多，但其中从语境中习得词汇是最有效的方法之一。本文主要讨论了语境词汇习得的优点以及在语境中习得词汇的具体方法。 这些语境大致分为两种，即词语语境和情景语境。词语语境包括搭配语境、词缀语境和联想语境，而情景语境涉及到有关说话者心理、文化差异以及中英意义不对等等问题。本文的研究结果表明，对不同语境线索的掌握以及对语境中习得词汇技巧的运用，将会使词汇习得变得更加富有成效。

关键词：语境词汇习得；词语语境；情景语境；成效

1. Introduction
Acquiring vocabulary is what students have to do either to pass the exams at school or to communicate with others outside the campus. Without enough vocabulary, the knowledge students have acquired is like a house without foundations. That's why vocabulary acquisition is so essential no matter how complicated or boring it may be.
 In China, vocabulary acquisition has been a problem for most EFL students. Currently, some problems still exist in vocabulary acquisition. First, most of the methods are traditional and there is a long way to go before root learning and test-taking turn into innovation. Students just try to memorize vocabulary and take dictation quizzes and exams to check if they know how to spell the words. They seldom put their vocabulary into daily use. The English words one needs to memorize are those from the word list in the book, which are also what teachers ask them to remember. It makes students think that they don’t need to memorize more words than necessary. In fact, most Chinese students are constrained by the traditional mode, which can't help them improve a lot with vocabulary acquisition. Second, their intention to learn vocabulary is not clear. The purpose of learning a language is to use it to communicate with people and make oneself understood. However, in modern times students barely communicate with people on their initiative with the language they have learned. Instead, they tend to learn it passively and rely on their teachers and text books too much. Most of them learn languages just to pass the exams. They can understand the meaning of each word but find it difficult to use appropriate words to express themselves.