A Study Of The Effects Of Sequential Input Of Word Meaning And Form On College Students' Noticing And Acquisition Of Them

Vocabulary learning,which covers the whole process of language learning,is of utter importance for sufficient linguistic competence.In light of the crucial role that vocabulary plays in SLA,over the past thirty years,researches concerning vocabulary acquisition have gained more and more attentions.In the process of vocabulary acquisition,it is unrealistic to get a thorough understanding of every aspect of vocabulary knowledge owing to its broad range of content.Therefore,researches into lexical form and meaning,or in other words,researches into the input of word form and meaning have raised increasing concern as is the case that they appear to be more basic and important in language learning.On basis of this,the present study laid emphasis on word form and word meaning as the main research focus of vocabulary knowledge.In recent years,the research as to the combination of cognitive psychology and language acquisition mechanism has gradually become a hot topic.An increasing number of researchers acknowledge the assumption that consciousness plays an essential role in SLA.Based on that assumption,Schmidt put forward the “Noticing Hypothesis”,in which “noticing” is a section of information process in the brain and also an essential part in the process of SLA.Since then,many methods and theories have been developed to improve learners' attention to certain language items through external manipulation,such as the method of Input Enhancement.Input Enhancement is a method to improve learners' attention by making the target language items prominent.By retrieving related literature,relatively few studies are found concerning researches into the effect of the sequential input enhancement of word form and meaning on learners' noticing and acquisition.With the intention of enriching the research in this field and providing a new perspective for English vocabulary instruction,the author employs the empirical study which attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)Whether the sequential input enhancement of word form and meaning affect college students' noticing of vocabulary knowledge.(2)Whether the sequential input enhancement of word meaning and form affect college students' acquisition of vocabulary knowledge.(3)Whether there is any correlation between the noticing effect and acquisition of vocabulary knowledge caused by different input orders of word meaning and word form.The 90 participants of the study are sophomores from two parallel classes majoring in environmental design in Shandong Youth University of Political Science.They were randomly assigned into three groups with 30 students in each group.Two weeks before the experiment,a vocabulary size test was conducted.One week before the experiment,a pretest was performed to further ensure that the target words were new words to the participants.In the process of the experiment,the three groups respectively received the input of form firstly and meaning secondly,input of meaning firstly and form secondly,and simultaneous input of form and meaning.At the end of the experiment,the three groups received immediate post-test.A week after the immediate post-test,the delayed post-test was conducted to investigate the effect of sequential input enhancement of word form and meaning on learners' acquisition of word knowledge.The quantitative analysis with SPSS V18.0 led to the following results:(1)The sequential input enhancement of word knowledge significantly affects learners' noticing to word form and meaning both on the whole and in part.The effect of sequential input is better than simultaneous input.(2)The sequential input enhancement of word knowledge has no significant influence on learners' acquisition of word form and meaning.There is no significant difference between the effect of sequential input and simultaneous input,either.(3)The sequential input enhancement of word knowledge leads to significantly different effect between learners' noticing and acquisition of word form and meaning.The effect of noticing is far better than that of acquisition.To sum up,the study proves that the sequential input of word form and word meaning significantly increase learners' noticing to word knowledge.Thus the method can be applied to learn word form or word meaning according to specific teaching goal.Based on conclusion of this research,some suggestions for English vocabulary teaching and learning are proposed.Limitations of the present study and suggestions for further study are provided.