Enhancing Polysemes Acquisition Based On Swain's Output Hypothesis

Vocabulary is the basis of language and the existence of polysemy is the necessary product of language development and embodies richness of language. Promoting learners' acquisition of polysemes will greatly improve their language proficiency in reading and writing, even reinforce their ability of fluent expression and avoid repetition in the target language. The facts indicate the importance of polysemes in language learning and of searching for appropriate polysemes teaching methods so that learners' lexical learning could be effectively strengthened.Language input has always been a hot topic in Second Language Acquisition. Since its proposition by Krashen, Input Hypothesis has been attached great importance. Comparatively speaking, the impact of language output on second language acquisition has been neglected. Till 1980s when Swain proposed her Output Hypothesis, the great role of output was gradually recognized by more linguists. She points out that learners' output can help them use the language more fluently and accurately and elaborates its three functions, namely, noticing function, hypothesis testing function and meta-linguistic function, which are proved by many later studies. But till now, the studies on polysemes teaching and learning from the perspective of Output Hypothesis are rare both at home and abroad. As a result, it is meaningful to conduct a research from this aspect, in which the researcher tries to explore new methods of polysemes teaching based on Output Hypothesis and the three functions of output. It could be proved that acquisition can be effectively improved when output is added as a means of teaching.The present study is an empirical one, in which the subjects come from two parallel classes. One is experimental group, in which new teaching method is employed; the other control group, in which the traditional method is applied. The results obtained from the experiment are to answer the following research questions:(1) Can Output Hypothesis be applied to polysemes teaching and learning?(2) Will language output enhance polysemes teaching and learning?The experiment consists of three steps.(1) The subjects take a pretest before the training to ensure that they are of the same vocabulary level. The pretest is adapted from the Vocabulary Levels Test proposed by Schmitts & Clapham (2001). The analysis results with SPSS 13.0 prove that the two groups are of the same vocabulary level.(2) The training lasts 15 weeks and is based on their English textbook. Only polysemes is involved in the training, while other parts of the book are to be taught in regular ways. In experimental group, based on Swain's Output Hypothesis, there are three different ways to be used in the target words teaching: 1) making sentences according to the clues given by the researcher or their own learning experience after the explanation of its various meanings; 2) guessing the word meanings in different sentences presented by the researcher or the subjects, then making similar sentences; 3) paraphrasing the meanings of the word in the sentences and telling the part of speech and usage of the target word according to its central meaning given. The researcher would observe and check their work and explain to the whole class if there are any problems. In the control group, all the words are just explained and taught in traditional way as usual.(3) After the training course, a posttest made up of two parts is carried out; the first one focused on testing subjects' receptive competence of the target words and the second one on their productive competence. Their performance is to be collected and preserved for later analysis with SPSS 13.0.The results after one month's analysis show that the subjects in experimental group are significantly more competent in receptive knowledge of the target words. As for productive competence, experimental group shows, but not very prominent, advantage over control group. The reason for it is perhaps that improving productive competence for an individual is a long-lasting process. In the present study, the training course is short and the amount of output is quite limited. Great improvement is relatively impossible. In addition, the analysis results show that the gap between good learners and average ones within experimental group is larger than that within control group, which is out of expectation. The reason is that there are still some subjects in experimental group who are neither motivated enough nor willing to cooperate with the researcher.The main research questions in this thesis have been answered with the results of the experiment. That is, Output Hypothesis and the functions of output can be applied to polysemes teaching and output can actually accelerate polysemes learning.