An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Collaborative Output Upon The English Vocabulary Acquisition Of Middle School Students

Vocabulary learning,as one of the building blocks,has drawn much attention from scholars in language learning.How to help students acquire their vocabulary effectively has become a key issue of researchers.Collaborative output modes by Niu Ruiying and Helms-Park(2014)consist of three steps: reading the text alone,reconstruction and correction.Many scholars both at home and abroad held the view that collaborative output is an effective way for vocabulary teaching and vocabulary learning.In this thesis,the author intends to do an experimental study to find out which collaborative output mode,collaborative written or oral output mode,to the teaching of English reading can better facilitate English vocabulary acquisition of middle school students.To be more specific,two research questions in this thesis are listed as follow:(1)How does the collaborative written output mode differ from the collaborative oral one in the teaching of English reading,in terms of their effects on the middle school students' English receptive vocabulary acquisition?(2)How does the collaborative written output mode differ from the collaborative oral one in the teaching of English reading,in terms of their effects on the middle school students' English productive vocabulary acquisition?60 students from the researcher's two parallel classes are chosen as the participants in this study,and Class 5 of Grade 9 was assigned as the collaborative written output group(CWOG)while Class 6 of Grade 9 was assigned as the collaborative oral output group(COOG).The whole experiment was conducted from October 15,2018 to November 16,2018,which lasted one month.The research procedure includes English vocabulary level test,pilot study,the collaborative output teaching experiment,the immediate vocabulary tests,the delayed vocabulary tests,and interviews.All the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 24.0.The results reveal that for receptive vocabulary,there is no difference between collaborativewritten and oral output modes to the teaching of English reading in the middle school students' vocabulary acquisition and that for productive vocabulary,collaborative written output has better effect than collaborative oral output to the teaching of English reading in the middle school students' vocabulary acquisition.The findings of this study are that the collaborative written output mode and the collaborative oral output mode have different effects on the middle school students' English vocabulary acquisition.The two output modes have almost the same effects on the middle school students' English receptive vocabulary acquisition,but the collaborative written output mode has better effects on the middle school students' English productive vocabulary acquisition.These main research findings support the previous research findings(Wolff,2000;Smith,2004)that writing(written output)is more conducive to language learning than speaking(oral output).