Learning vocabulary has long been considered a challenging aspect of learning Chinese as a foreign language. To improve Chinese vocabulary instruction, a number of methods have been proposed: morpheme-based, chunking and collocation-based, and association-based. However, these methods do not achieve an ideal learning result because they ignore the contexts for vocabulary: students do not know when and where to use words or use them inappropriately even though they may “have” a large vocabulary.
Realizing the disadvantage of teaching vocabulary out of context, practitioners and material designers in this field began to emphasize the importance of context and made some exploration in this area. However, an investigation of four sets of representative Chinese pedagogical materials indicates that the understanding of the concept of context is partial and incomplete, which results in inappropriate approaches to vocabulary instruction.
To clarify the complicated notion of context in which vocabulary operates, this study proposes a hierarchical model within which three layers of contexts are integrated. Chinese vocabulary instruction should attend to all three layers of context: linguistic, communicative, and cultural contexts, in order to help learners use words with linguistic correctness, communicative relevance and cultural appropriateness.
As a pedagogical approach, performed culture puts the culture at the center of language teaching and is devoted to integrating language learning into cultural learning. Meanwhile, performed culture emphasizes that language must be learned and practiced in the cultural context. Thus, vocabulary instruction within performed culture first begins with a clear purpose in mind that vocabulary learning goes beyond mere “word learning”. Words are put back to their original cultural contexts to examine their meanings and practiced in authentic communicative activities as well. Thus, the teaching practice in performed culture verifies the feasibility and validity of this model and provides a good example of how to implement this model. Cultural context is created by describing the underlying cultural and social background in detail or by the application of multi-media. Vocabulary is presented and practiced in a well-designed communicative context through performance. In this process, vocabulary and the three well defined contexts are integrated and learned by the learner.
Key words: Chinese vocabulary, context, language pedagogy, communication, culture