Chinese EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Learning:the Role Of Collaborative Oral Output

This study attempts to find out the role of collaborative oral output on Chinese EFL learners’ productive and receptive vocabulary learning. Because oral output may be more helpful than written output in vocabulary learning(de la Fuente 2003),and collaborative learning can facilitate vocabulary learning(Niu 2012). Yet research into whether collaborative oral output outperforms individual oral output in vocabulary learning and whether different task roles in collaborative oral output influence vocabulary learning effect need more empirical evidence. A total of 59 university English majors participated and respectively completed collaborative oral output task, individual oral output task, and reading comprehension task. The oral output tasks required text retelling, while the reading comprehension task took the form of True or False questions. Immediately after the tasks, all the three groups took productive and receptive vocabulary test to detect their vocabulary knowledge increase.The major findings of this research are as follows. 1) Oral output group achieved significantly better learning outcome than reading comprehension group. 2)Collaborative oral output group did not have significantly better learning effect than individual oral output group. 3) Reporters and non-reporters in collaborative oral output group did not gain significantly different learning effect.Conclusions can be drawn based on the above research findings. 1) Oral output can enhance vocabulary learning greatly. 2) No matter collaborative or individual,ways to make the output may not influence vocabulary learning. This provides negative evidence to the Vygotsky’s(1978, 1986) viewpoint that collaborative learning is superior to individual learning.3) Different task roles in collaborative oraloutput task may not influence vocabulary learning. This further proves Niu’s(2012)study that task roles may not make a difference in vocabulary learning.