A Study On The Effect Of Different Vocabulary Presentation Methods On Vocabulary Memory Of Middle School Students From The Perspective Of Cognitive Psychology

As one of the basic language materials,vocabulary has always received attention in ESL classes in secondary schools,while the effective presentation of vocabulary determines middle school students’ retention and understanding of new words.According to cognitive psychology,memorizing unknown words is precisely the cognitive process of processing new information.In vocabulary teaching,the extent to which students know the target words will directly affect their retention.Therefore,it is crucial to explore the effective method of presenting vocabulary.Using cognitive psychology as a guide and its three theoretical branches(memory theory,information processing theory and dual coding theory)as a systematic theoretical framework,this paper tests the effects of three different vocabulary presentation methods(vocabulary lists,pictures and contexts)on junior high school students’ English vocabulary memory through an experiment.One hundred thirty-five junior high school students were selected and divided into three experimental groups with different vocabulary presentation methods,and 30 English words were selected as target words.The subjects were given two tests,the instant test at the end of the presentation of the target words and a time-lapse test one week later,which are identical in form and duration.The experimental results were analyzed using SPSS 26.0 for descriptive statistics,one-way ANOVA,multiple comparison analysis and paired-samples T-test to draw the following conclusions.(1)The results of the instant test showed that there were no significant differences in the short-term memory effects of the three vocabulary presentation methods.The presentation of pictures was the most effective and significantly different from the contextual presentation,the presentation of word list was the second most effective,and the presentation of context functioned least effectively.(2)The results of the time-lapse test showed that no significant difference existed in the effects of students’ long-term memory among the three methods of vocabulary presentation.The presentation of context was the most effective and significantly different from the presentation of word list;the presentation of picture was the second most effective,while the presentation of word list had the worst effect on subjects’ long-term memory of target words.(3)Except for the presentation method of context,there were significant differences between the instant and time-lapse tests for the other two methods,indicating different levels of forgetting trends.The rate of memory-fading using the method of context was the slowest,the presentation of pictures sat in between,while the memory-fading tendency developed most sharply in the presentation of word list.Based on the above findings,the following conclusions were drawn:(1)Different presentation methods effect on students’ vocabulary memorization.(2)Contextual and picture associations can help students deepen their knowledge of vocabulary,but teachers still need to choose the appropriate vocabulary presentation methods by considering the specific teaching objectives and the language ability of the learners.(3)Teachers should pay attention to the difficulty of the learning materials and the selections of pictures to avoid random presentations which may distract students’ vocabulary learning.