The Study Of Memorial Effectiveness On Vocabulary Teaching

As an issue that figures prominently in the study of second language acquisition, the problem of vocabulary acquisition is attracting more and more academic concern. Some scholar (Lewis, 1993) believes that vocabulary acquisition is the center of second language acquisition. All the language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation, etc, must be related to vocabulary. Someone else thinks that the core of all kinds of English abilities is not the knowledge above the sentence level but language knowledge; However, vocabulary is the core of the core (王大伟, 1997). Therefore, vocabulary teaching is the most important one of all the links in English language teaching. In order to improve students'communicative competence, we have to start with the research on the minimum language unit. To help students enlarge their vocabulary and improve their lexical competence is the guarantee of the improvement of English language teaching. Many researches have been done to explore what factors may influence the learners'vocabulary development and how to improve the vocabulary memorizing in recent years. With the development of cognitive psychology and information processing model, more attention has been paid to the relation between memory and vocabulary development. This paper tries to specify the role of memory in vocabulary acquisition from the perspective of information processing in psycholinguistics, in order to exam the influence of this model on foreign vocabulary memorizing. As one of those theories of psycholinguistics, information processing theory is concerned with the process in which people receive, deal with and apply the information they got. The exertion of the information processing theory in vocabulary teaching can be represented as the process of helping the students memorize, store and recollect the vocabulary. According to the information processing theory and the nature of memory, the deeper the processing, the more durable the memory of the item processed. So, in vocabulary teaching, the teachers should help the students to transfer the vocabulary from surface-level into the depth-level purposefully. To accomplish the purpose, the teachers should use some teaching methodology and strategies designedly, such as placing the new words into a context, making vocabulary cards, etc. Then the paper gives implications for vocabulary course design, classroom teaching and teachers'vocabulary teaching approaches: According to the vocabulary's important place in English application, we can regard vocabulary learning as an individual course; in order to help the students to memorize the vocabulary, we should integrate new words with the old, promote a deep level of processing and introduce mnemonic devices to the students, such as applying poetry, songs and pictures, etc. The last but not the least, teachers should focus on encouraging the students'vocabulary independent learning strategies.