Effect Of Semantic Transparency Upon Chinese Junior High School English Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary plays an important role in English learning.Vocabulary is the basis for improving students’ listening,speaking,reading and writing skills.The semantic transparency of vocabulary is one of the most important factors affecting the effectiveness of vocabulary learning.Semantic transparency refers to the ease of inferring the meaning of a whole word from the meaning of individual morphemes in a compound word or derivative word.In recent years,there have been many studies on vocabulary pedagogy,but few have examined the exploitation of semantic transparency in junior high school English vocabulary teaching.Therefore,this paper investigated the effect of semantic transparency upon junior high school English vocabulary acquisition through a series of teaching experiments.A total of 202 students from Grade Junior One and Grade Junior Three of Baogang No.3 Middle School in Baotou,Inner Mongolia,participated in the experiment.There were 51 students in each of the two classes of Grade Junior One,and 50 students in each of the two classes of Grade Junior Three.The two classes of each grade formed the experimental class and the control class,respectively.The pre-test result shows that there were no significant differences in vocabulary proficiency between the two classes in Grade Junior One,and between the two classes in Grade Junior Three before the experiment.At the same time,20 English graduate students scored 60 English vocabulary words(30 from the PEP version junior English textbook for Grade Seven and 30 from the PEP version junior English textbook for Grade Nine),based on a Likert5-point scale for semantic transparency.From the 30 rated words for Grade Junior One,10 words with the highest semantic transparency and 10 words with the lowest were selected for the teaching experiment;the same way was applied to the vocabulary for Grade Junior Three.A general vocabulary teaching method was generalized from interviews with 5 in-service teachers and library research,and the method was used in the control class.The experimental class was taught with the method of enhancing the semantic transparency of vocabulary.In addition to the teaching method,the two classes maintained the same teaching schedule and post-class assignments.In addition,all the four classes participating in this experiment were taught by the same teacher.After the vocabulary experiments,immediate post-tests and delayed post-tests were conducted,and the data were analyzed by SPSS 26.0.It was found that,firstly,semantic transparency affected vocabulary learning,with middle school learners scoring higher on vocabulary items with high semantic transparency and lower on items with low semantic transparency.Second,the experimental class scored significantly better than did the control class on both the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test,indicating that the vocabulary teaching method based on the enhancement of semantic transparency is better than the general teaching method.Finally,the experimental class scored significantly higher than the control class on the items with low semantic transparency,in both the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test.The experimental class scored slightly higher than the control class on the items with high semantic transparency,but no significant difference was observed.It shows that teaching methods that enhance semantic transparency are more effective in teaching vocabulary with low semantic transparency.The result provides teachers with some new ideas on English vocabulary teaching.Teachers can consider classifying vocabulary according to semantic transparency in the process of vocabulary teaching,and using appropriate methods to teach different words.Besides,teachers should pay attention to developing students’ ability to identify English roots and affixes and guessing the meaning of words according to the context,so as to improve the effectiveness of vocabulary teaching.