An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of English Vocabulary Teaching Based On Conceptual Domain On Primary School Students' English Vocabulary Acquisition

This paper explores the influence of primary school students' English vocabulary acquisition based on conceptual domain.A conceptual domain is a body of knowledge within our conceptual system that contains related ideas(concepts)and experiences.And the vocabulary teaching approach based on conceptual domain helps students remember the words through establishing links of the relevant concepts and experience in the minds.This paper is designed to seek the following questions:(1)Can the English vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain improve the students' short-term memory of vocabulary learning?(2)Can the English vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain improve the students' long-term memory of vocabulary learning? This paper adopts the method of empirical research to design the experiment of English vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain.The subjects were the students of two classes chosen from a primary school in Grade four in Nansha District of Guangzhou.In each of the two classes,30 students were selected as subjects to ensure that the two classes were parallel classes.They were divided into the experiment group(EG)and the control group(CG)in the period of 3 months.A pretest was done to have an evaluation of students' vocabulary before adopting the teaching approach based on conceptual domain.The result reveals that there was no significant difference in the lexical level between EG and CG.During the experiment,the EG adopted the teaching method based on conceptual domain and the CG adopted the traditional teaching method.The vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain is that the teacher first connects the relationship between the target word and other words and constructs a conceptual domain of this target word.The teacher then teaches the students new words through the conceptual domain.To examine whether the vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain can improve students' short-term memory of vocabulary,five while-tests were carried out after the new words were taught.The five vocabulary tests were based on the five modules of the textbook.The five groupsof vocabulary are conceptual domains based on rooms,houses,schools,occupations,and clothes.The P value for the five independent sample t-test were 0.925,0.192,0.378,0.060,and 0.319 which were all higher than 0.05.The result reveals that there is no significant difference in the scores between EG and CG.So,there is no significant difference in the short-term memory of the vocabulary between the EG and CG.A posttest was carried out to examine whether the English vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain can improve students' long-term memory of vocabulary in EG and CG.The P value of the independent sample t-test was 0.028,which was lower than 0.05.The results showed that the EG performed better than CG in the scores of the post-test.The conclusion of this paper is as follows:(1)The English vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain can't improve the students' short-term memory of vocabulary learning.(2)The English vocabulary teaching method based on conceptual domain can improve students' long-term memory of vocabulary learning.