The Influence Of Cognitive Context On EFL Vocabulary Learning

In the process of L2 acquisition, people may become more and more aware of the fact that we can understand a sentence or an utterance consisting of correct words and an incorrect grammatical structure, but never can we digest the one with incorrect words and a correct grammatical structure. EFL learners are universally aware of the fact that vocabulary learning is the major difficult task they face. Even for the advanced EFL learners, their big obstacle is still vocabulary. Since Chinese EFL teaching is much influenced by the traditional teaching methods (such as the Grammar-Translation method), the teaching and learning of vocabulary usually focuses on the vocabulary list. Therefore, forgetting the already-learnt words seems very common among Chinese EFL learners.The formation and development of language are based on cognition, and related closely to human's social life. The seemingly-easy words are always the productions of human's material life and cultural life. In language using and human's communication, language alone is not enough. Thus in order to make language using more effective and successful, concrete context occurs, which does not usually work well. In verbal communication, cognitive factors are most important, so, apart from concrete context, cognitive context deserves more attention. Cognitive context refers to the conceptualized and structurized systematic pragmatic knowledge and is the result of the pragmatic factors internalized in people's mind, that is to say, the systematic pragmatic knowledge is stored in participants'mind and is activated to participate in the communication. Compared with traditional context, cognitive context is dynamic, gestalt and humanistic.Taking cognitive context as theoretical foundation, the present research, based on the theory of depths of processing and Oxford's memory strategies, makes an exploratory research on the influence of introducing cognitive context to EFL teaching on EFL learners'memory strategies, long-term memory as well as their divergent thinking skills.The data for the research was mainly obtained through three instruments --- questionnaires, vocabulary tests and think-aloud procedures. The subjects were 60 second-year students majored in English from two classes (class 1 and class 2) in Xi'an Fanyi University, 30 of which constituted the experimental group (EG) and the other 30 the control group (CG). The collected data from the instruments was given descriptive and interpretive analyses, based primarily on the results of the SPSS statistical program.The main hypothesis of the research has been supported by the results of both quantitative and qualitative data analyses. The findings of the research indicate that subjects in both EG and CG hold positive beliefs about RL in EFL vocabulary learning, prior to the intervention (the teaching of cognitive context to the EG). However, after the intervention, the subjects in EG changed their beliefs about RL significantly while the subjects'beliefs in CG remained almost the same as before the intervention. The results also suggest that there are some significant differences in memory strategies preferences,long-term memory and divergent thinking skills between the learners who hold positive beliefs and those who hold negative beliefs about RL.