The Different Effects Of Thematic And Semantic Clustering Presentations On Multidimensional Vocabulary Knowledge Acquisition Of Junior Middle School Students

"Without grammar,very little can be conveyed,without vocabulary,nothing can be conveyed"(Wilkins,1972),which shows vocabulary is the core of the language.Language acquisition is,to a large extent,the acquisition of vocabulary(Gass & Seliner,2001),which determines that vocabulary acquisition is a non-negligible part of students’ English learning.As the first step in vocabulary instruction,vocabulary presentation is also an important factor affecting students’ vocabulary acquisition.Word clustering presentations are popular as effective methods for presenting vocabulary in foreign language classes.However,no consistent conclusion has been reached on the respective advantages of thematic clustering presentation and semantic clustering presentation in second language acquisition.Besides,most of the previous studies on the influence of vocabulary presentation have focused on the acquisition of form and meaning of vocabulary,but few have paid attention to the acquisition of multidimensional vocabulary knowledge.Therefore,this paper will investigate the different effects of thematic and semantic clustering presentations on multidimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition of junior middle school students,which will explore two questions as follows:(1)What are the overall effects of thematic clustering presentation and semantic clustering presentation on students’ multidimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition in junior middle school?(2)What are the specific effects of thematic clustering presentation and semantic clustering presentation on students’ vocabulary knowledge acquisition of five dimensions(orthography,form and meaning,collocations,grammatical functions,associations)in junior middle school?This experiment was conducted within three parallel classes of the eighth grade in a junior middle school in Guangzhou,with class 8 of the eighth grade participating in the pilot test and classes 9 and 10 participating in the formal experiment.In the formal vocabulary teaching trial,the author presented words using thematic clustering for class 9 and semantic clustering for class 10.An immediate post-test of students’ multidimensional knowledge of vocabulary would be administered immediately after the vocabulary instruction,and a delayed post-test will be administered one week later.At the end of the experiment,three students from each class were selected for semi-structured interviews.The experimental data would be subsequently processed by SPSS26 software,and the interviews would also be analyzed by transitional analysis.The findings of the experiments are as follows:(1)As to the overall effects on multidimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition,there is no significant difference in the effects on the whole acquisition and receptive knowledge acquisition of multidimensional vocabulary knowledge,but semantic clustering presentation produces significantly better learning results than thematic clustering presentation at productive knowledge learning.(2)As to the specific effects on each dimension of vocabulary knowledge acquisition,the significant advantages of thematic and semantic clustering presentations are reflected in different dimensions except for the dimension of orthography.Thematic clustering presentation shows its advantages in two dimensions.In the dimension of form and meaning,it does significantly better in receptive knowledge acquisition in the immediate post-test and productive knowledge acquisition in the delayed post-test;in the dimension of collocations,it does a better job in the receptive knowledge acquisition in the delayed post-test.In contrast,semantic clustering presentations show significant superiority in the dimension of grammatical functions and productive knowledge learning in the dimension of associations.In light of the above findings,there are some implications for vocabulary teaching.Teachers should pay attention to the innovative use of teaching materials when teaching vocabulary,trying to think and discover the connections and differences between known and unknown learning content,and choosing appropriate vocabulary presentations such as thematic and semantic clustering presentations according to the focus of teaching purposes and learning tasks,and encourage students to learn vocabulary knowledge in a connected way.