A Study On The Effect Of Role-play Teaching Approach On Productive Vocabulary Learning

Merrill Swain proposed that the output activity in target language can promote students to notice and recognize their target language problems. Moreover, learners can constantly internalize what they say, and make them part of their cognitive activity during the output process. In addition, Merrill Swain also discovered that learners can naturally develop their independently cognitive thinking competence through cooperative activities. Therefore, it is necessary and important to study the effect of target language output on English learning.It is a common phenomenon that many English learners with high score in examination perform badly in the real communication situation. Many linguists explore the reason for this phenomenon mainly from the perspective of students'receptive channel.However, the researches for this phenomenon from the perspective of students'output are few. This paper is an exploration on the influence of role-play teaching approach on students'productive vocabulary learning, based on Swain' output hypothesis and cooperative learning theory. The research questions in this paper are:Is role-play teaching approach effective for productive vocabulary learning? What positive effects can role-play teaching approach bring to students'productive vocabulary learning? Compared with the traditional teaching approach, which is more effective for productive vocabulary learning? Through the statistics of the experiment, it is proved that for students of same language proficiency level, those who receive the role-play teaching approach perform much better than those who receive the traditional teaching approach in terms of productive vocabulary learning. For the students of different language proficiency level, after they all receive the role-play teaching approach, high level students outperform low level students in the aspect of productive vocabulary learning, which reflects that the effect of role-play teaching approach is closely related to students'language proficiency level.