Word Presentation On Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

In the traditional teaching approach of second language, acquisition of grammar has always been playing a major role, whereas vocabulary acquisition a minor one. Structure has been attached great attention while vocabulary not. Therefore, the teaching of vocabulary is only one part attached to the teaching of grammar, syntax and discourse. But since the 1980s, vocabulary and the teaching of it have drawn much more attention than before. Not only have the theoretical linguistics field exerted enthusiasm to vocabulary, but the applied linguists have realized its significance in language teaching.With the increase of researches on vocabulary, the perspective has been shifted from linguistics to cognitive psychology. The research has been expanded from vocabulary knowledge itself to the indication of knowledge in people's mind and its psychological model (i. e., how knowledge is stored in the memory). Researchers, through the investigation on the learning, memorizing and extracting process of vocabulary, are attempting to find an effective means of vocabulary teaching. Among them, the research on vocabulary representation has been carried out.The teaching of vocabulary is an important step in the teaching of Chinese as the first language, and one vital access to vocabulary for learners is textbooks. Therefore, a textbook in which vocabulary is represented appropriately can make the learning much easier. Based on the accomplishments in the field of English teaching, the author tests the differences of acquisition under two ways of vocabulary representation through an experiment. She investigates the representation of vocabulary in textbooks, through the analysis of the data from the experiment and then the comparison of lexical representation and contextual representation in traditional textbooks. The author hopes that the results can serve as a reference for the appropriate representation of vocabulary in Chinese textbooks designed for foreigners.In the experiment, 69 beginners learning Chinese have been tested and 60 valid data have been collected. From the analysis of the data, it can be concluded that: contextual representation and lexical representation can lead to strikingly different acquisition results of vocabulary. Specifically, when instant or delayed tests are taken, the differences are more prominent in the phonological and semantic dimension than in the character forms. From the results, it can be seen that, contextual representation is better than lexical representation in the textbooks designed for foreigners, in which the latter can be adopted more widely.This is a primary investigation on the ways that vocabulary can be represented in Chinese for foreigners, and may has limitations due to all the subjective and objective conditions, thus needs to be carried out further.