Effectivehess Of Root-based Word Part Strategy On Chinese EFL Learners’s Acquisition Of Receptive And Productive Vocabulary Knowledge

Previous literature shows that words in a foreign language are easier to learn when they have familiar forms and easier form-meaning connections and when they are learned with deeper levels of processing.Research in morphology and EFL vocabulary learning also shows that morphological knowledge and morphological analysis ability as well as the word part strategy,which makes use of such knowledge and ability,facilitate English vocabulary acquisition.However,such research pays more attention to the roles of affixes or the composition of roots and affixes and has done limited work investigating how the form and meaning connections between roots and derivatives can influence the effectiveness of the word part strategy,and the learning result of productive vocabulary knowledge using this strategy has not been fully tested as it should be.Therefore,this study aims to examine the influence of formal and semantic relations between English roots and derivatives on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge through root-based word part strategy.Considering the disparity between two significant semantic relations,viz.semantic similarity and conceptual evocation,both types of semantic relations are to be evaluated.Two experiments are conducted to explore the issues.The results of Experiment-1 prove that semantic similarity and conceptual evocation are not only different from each other in direction and content of the relation but also not correlated in quantified strength.It is also found in Experiment-2 that when root-based word part strategy is applied to derivative learning by Chinese EFL learners,the three relational variables,viz.conceptual evocation,semantic similarity and formal similarity between roots and derivatives,interact with each other and/or have certain independent influence on the acquisition of different aspects of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.Conceptual evocation from roots to derivatives turns out to have the strongest influence among the three types of relations between roots and derivatives on the acquisition of most aspects of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge gained with root-based word part strategy.