An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Language Motivation Theory On Technical College Students' Vocabulary Acquisition

Language motivation accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning. It can be classified into phonetic motivation, morphological motivation, semantic motivation and etymological motivation. On the basis of language motivation theory, this thesis reports a quasi-experiment exploring the effect of language motivation theory on technical college students' vocabulary acquisition. It was conducted under the College English teaching environment. Subjects involved in this study were 60 first year CPA (Certified Public Accountant) students from two intact classes at Wuhan Technical College of Communications. For the sake of convenience, students in 05 CPA (1) would be referred to as the experiment group (with the help of language motivation) and students in 05 CPA (2) would be referred to as the control group (without the help of language motivation). Two vocabulary tests were carried out immediately after the teaching of language motivation theory and one month later. The vocabulary tests of the 60 subjects were administered during class time and the response rate was 100 percent. The present study attempts to address the three key research questions as follows:1) Does the teaching of language motivation theory facilitate technical college students' vocabulary acquisition?2) Does the teaching of language motivation theory have more far-reaching influence than the traditional rote memory method?3) Which type of motivation is easily to be acquired?In the quantitative analysis, all the data were run by the powerful software SPSS 12.0. The results indicated compared with the traditional rote memory method, language motivation theory does not have much influence on technical college students' vocabulary acquisition in the short term. In other words, in the long term, language motivation theory exerts substantial influence on learners' vocabulary acquisition. Morphological motivation has much more influence on participants' vocabulary learning, compared with phonetic motivation, semantic motivation and etymological motivation. The average score in each column of the experiment group...