An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ Acquiring Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge

Vocabulary is the fundamental construction of language that can be used independently.And as an essential measure of vocabulary ability,the depth of vocabulary knowledge has been pervasively concerned by researchers since the 1990 s.Studies at home and abroad have testified that the depth of vocabulary knowledge restricts the development of learners’ overall language ability to a large extent.At the same time,The English Curriculum Standards for Regular High School(2017)stipulates that learners are not only supposed to expand vocabulary size by means of reading and other input activities,but also need to use words appropriately to convey meaning and opinion in the context,which raises higher requirements on the depth of learners’ vocabulary knowledge.However,in senior high schools,students still prefer to conduct vocabulary learning by traditional reading task and mechanical practice,which accounts for their deficiency in acquiring depth of vocabulary knowledge manifesting in frequent occurrence of problems such as the misuse of part of speech and improper collocation.The existence of such problems results in the stagnant development of their language ability.Therefore,it is necessary to explore an effective vocabulary teaching method that helps students widen their vocabulary knowledge and improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning.As a new teaching model,the continuation task has been proved to be superior to reading task on fostering second language acquisition for the sake of its tight incorporation of input and output as well as the language imitation and content creation.Recently,researches on the promoting effect of continuation task have permeated into various fields and yielded plentiful achievements.However,the majority of the researches mainly focus on the syntax and discourse and don’t give particular attention to vocabulary.Although a few studies have affirmed that continuation task can facilitate vocabulary learning,they fail to go deeper into the depth of vocabulary knowledge.In light of such gap,this study centers on the two types of words with relatively high error rate: adjectives and nouns,comparing the effect of continuation task and reading task on students’ acquiring depth of noun and adjective knowledge in the hope of providing novel implications to modify students’ vocabulary learning.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)Compared with reading task,what is the effect of continuation task on senior high students’ depth of adjective knowledge?(2)Compared with reading task,what is the effect of continuation task on senior high students’ depth of noun knowledge?This study combines quantitative and qualitative method and lasts for three months.The subjects are from two parallel classes in Senior One of a high school located in Shijiazhuang,Hebei Province.With the same proficiency in depth of vocabulary knowledge,the two class are randomly divided into the experimental group and the control group,engaging 48 subjects in the experimental class and 47 subjects in the other.During the experiment,the experimental class is trained by continuation task biweekly while the control class is exposed to reading task with the same reading material as the experimental class.Before the experiment,the author examines the depth of students’ vocabulary knowledge by means of Word Association Test designed by Read(1993).And after the experiment,the scale is adopted again to conduct the posttest.All the data are further collected and analyzed by SPSS 26.0 Software.In addition,the author randomly selects 10 subjects from different vocabulary levels to carry out the interview,aiming to comprehensively reveal the effect of continuation task on students’ vocabulary learning.Through the analyses and elucidation of the pre-test,post-test and the interview,the conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1)Compared with reading task,continuation task exerts more significant impact on students’ enhancement in depth of adjective knowledge,but its positive effect on students’ acquisition of meaning is more prominent.(2)Compared with reading task,continuation task makes a more significant difference on students’ reinforcement in depth of noun knowledge,but its positive impact is more conspicuous in students’ acquisition of collocation.