【正文】 process requiring the listener interpreting messages received through the ears withone‘s knowledge of the world. The contradiction situation between the students‘ poorperformance in listening prehension and the listening requirements of collegestudents reminds us that some measures must be taken to change it.Many factors contribute to the difficulty of a better listening prehension.Vocabulary, one of the three cornerstones of a language, should arouse awareness ofits important role it plays in listening prehension. Many students may feel awfulwhen hearing a word but couldn‘t recognize it, even if he/she could easily interpret itwhen ing across it in reading materials. This monly existed phenomenonraised a question for teachers: how could we teachers teach vocabulary effectively soas to better students listening prehension capability?2. Brief introduction to vocabulary teaching in Higher Vocational CollegesHigher Vocational Colleges are generally considered as those of two orthreeyearprogram colleges, with the aims of training students‘ occupational skillsrequired in their later career. Most of the vocational college students score lower thanthose who attend universities in the National Entrance Examination. Due to theirpoorer achievements in English their motivation of studying English is parativelyweak.For many years, the vocabulary teaching has been maltreated or neglected duepartly to a specialization in linguistic research on syntax and phonology which mayhave fostered a climate in which vocabulary was treated as a less important element inlearning a second language. The following statement by Gleason, which strangelyappears to suggest that vocabulary doesn‘t have any ―content‖ or ―expression‖, can2 typically represent attitudes withheld by some teachers:In the second language learning, it‘s not difficult to figure that vocabulary is aparatively easy part, despite the fact that students fear vocabulary most. Thetougher part is to master new structures in content or expression. (Gleason, 1961:7from Ronald Carter, 1998:84)Through surveys on students‘ feelings on vocabulary learning and talking withcolleagues, I draw such conclusion: students were not taught enough words in class,especially the words they needed when municating with others, doing listeningprehension exercises or watching TV and movies. Students felt their teachers paidmore attention to teaching them grammar, improving their pronunciation, translatingtexts in class other than teaching them how to learn and what to learn about words.Knowing about a word‘s Chinese meaning from the syllabus is seldom adequate.In the syllabus, words are listed alphabetically with the correspondent Chinesemeaning. Students are required to remember all the words appeared in textbook ―newwords‖. The main purpose of memorizing all these words is to pass the final exams,the national College English Test Band 4 or Band 6. Therefore, many words recitedare only stored in students‘ shortterm memory as passive words and will neverbee active ones. This kind of vocabulary learning doesn‘t have much to do withlongterm effect. And in listening prehension, they can‘t successfully retrievethese words.Another problem existed in vocabulary teaching in nowadays higher vocationalcolleges is the lagging behind of teaching materials. Most excellent materials appliednationally or provincially have been used for years or decades. With the fastdevelopment of the world, the materials obviously couldn‘t contain words appearingin daily life and thus seem to be out of date. Therefore, students don‘t have fullchance to absorb and digest new words they urgently need to gain access to the newworld and new age.3. Reasons for choosing this topicAs far as reasons for choosing this topic are concerned, the following severalones can account for it. The first one is mentioned earlier in this chapter, the3 contradiction between the importance of listening prehension either in tests or inprehensive capability and the poor performance of vocational college students.The second one is that students seem to have mastered a quantity of words and canread fluently but they have much difficulty in understanding what they are listening to,much less could they municate fluently and successfully with other people,especially with foreigners. And here es the third: many researchers have exploreda lot about vocabulary teaching and listening prehension respectively, but whensearching the bination of the two, we can find few works.4. Purposes of the study1) To arouse the awareness of the importance of vocabulary teachingOn one hand, in China, English teachers tend to overlook the importance of thelexical system, which is especially true in middle school. This is mainly due to theconception that students are able to find a perfect equivalent Chinese meaning for aword from the word lists in the textbook or from a dictionary. Thus both teachers andstudents think that they can deal with the vocabulary more easily than with grammarand phonetics of English, which differ a lot from the Chinese grammar and soundsystem. Lexical items may also have been treated as a secondary importance becausethey have been seen only as what are used to flesh out the structure or to exemplifyparts of the sound system. However, without lexicon the major meaningcarryingelement in language is missing. Therefore, the acquisition of vocabulary is anessential part of English language teaching.On the other hand, there seems to be teachers who have tended to overemphasizethe learning of words in the new word lists. Although such teachers draw endlessatten