2。 Literature Review

In the late 1920s, situational language teaching which advocates teaching vocabulary should be in the context appeared in American and England。 It early applied context theory to the vocabulary teaching, and it strived to create real situation。 In the 1970s, communicative language teaching also focused on the importance of context during the process of vocabulary teaching and it advocates that teachers should make use of natural context to present vocabulary。 

In China, researchers began to realize the benefits of applying context in junior middle school in recent years。 Researchers mainly study vocabulary teaching as well as vocabulary learning。 As for vocabulary teaching, An Yajing and Wu Chen gave some sincere advice about how to create valid context in class。 In addition, Zhang Xiurong came up with some rules of creating context。 For vocabulary learning, Chen Jiansheng, Dong Xuezhen and Zhang Ruihua studied on how to memorize vocabulary as much as possible in the context。 This paper gives readers a concrete impression of context theory : its definition, classification and functions。 More importantly, it mainly introduces how to teach and learn English vocabulary in context。

3。 The Definition and Classification of Context Theory 

3。1 The definition of context来`自+优-尔^论:文,网www.chuibin.com +QQ752018766-

There exists numerous definition of context from different schools but how to define it in linguistics is still an unsolved problem, never arriving at a consistent perspective。 The origin of context descended from the Latin world “contextus” and it meant “a joint together”。 Context includes two respective meanings in accordance with the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary:(1)。the situation in which sth happens and that helps you to understand it (事情发生的）背景，环境，来龙去脉。(2)。the words that come just before and after a word, phrase or statement and help you to understand its meaning上下文;语境。(Wehmeier 429）It’s the common practice that we adopt the second meaning in a narrow sense which is recognized as linguistic context。 A large majority of modern linguistics, however, are inclined to study the context with the first definition in a broader sense。 Linguistics enlarge the range of context to a large extent which contains setting, background, society and even the culture which correlating with a word or a phrase。 It is the non-linguistic context that we call it。 Context is considered by linguistics as an sophisticated concept and its board idea exerts greater influence on language learning, in particular when we are confronted with the meaning of strange words。