Exploratory Innovation Of English Vocabulary Instruction From The Perspective Of Cognitive Psychology

Vocabulary is an important component of language as well as the basis oflinguistic abilities; vocabulary study is therefore very important in language teaching.Studies on learners' vocabulary have already shifted from quantitative investigation toqualitative one in foreign countries while in China, this kind of research mainlymeasures learners' passive vocabulary size, with the assessment of controlled activevocabulary being often neglected. This thesis begins with the current situation of Chinese students' vocabularyacquisition, pointing out the misconceptions of vocabulary acquisition existing amongChinese college students and teachers. Then, based on the overview of vocabularyresearch and study both at home and abroad, and the environment where Chinesecollege students learn English and the characteristics of Chinese students, the presentauthor tries to investigate the development of L2 vocabulary acquisition from the depthof vocabulary. An idea is proposed to explore the mechanism of vocabulary acquisitionfrom the angle of cognitive psychology. After the study of learners' cognitive ability, anew way of vocabulary teaching is put forward to apply to the English vocabularyteaching: classroom teachers should take a more comprehensive approach to vocabularydevelopment—the integrated approach. Meanwhile, an experimental teaching is carriedout at Xidian University in 2003, which involves 80 subjects to prove the feasibility andeffectiveness of this proposition. As the statistics show, the experimental class which istaught with the help of the integrated approach has a better performance in vocabularylearning than the control class. So it may be justified to say the teaching model proposedhere is more effective in vocabulary learning and teaching. However, it is by no meansto say that the model proposed in the paper is a better one. The absolute effectiveness ofthe study done here needs testing under more experiments. The drawbacks andsuggestions of this practice are also mentioned, with the hope of further improvement.