Roles Of Written Output On College Students' Acquisition Of English Vocabulary

The important role of vocabulary makes it the major research aspect in Second Language Acquisition. There are many research related to vocabulary, but their theoretical support are different. Merrill Swain---the famous linguist of Canada---put forward her famous hypothesis---Comprehensible Output Hypothesis in 1985. From then on, the important role of output was taken seriously. Based on Merrill Swain's hypothesis, this paper aims to study the role of output on English vocabulary acquisition.Output is defined as the actual production and use of the target language,including speaking and writing. While, input refers to the language materials that L2 learners receive through their exposure to target language environment,especially through listening and reading. Most former researchers paid much attention to the role of input. Especially, the birth of Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis caught too much attention of the linguists so that the important role of output was once treated coldly and doubtfully. However, in recent years, the importance of output has been realized generally. Concerning the effect of output on the acquisition of vocabulary in SLA, there are also many research, but most research put emphasis on the comparison of the effect of input and output. There are also many research related to the combination of this two, but few are related to the combination of this two combined in different sequence. Because the standard of judging spoken output is difficult to control,so only written output is adapted in this study. In this study, written output practice was placed into three kinds of task types, they are output task, input plus output task, output plus input task. In order to highlight the importance of output, input task was also included in this study, input practice would be given in this task.In this study, 100 junior non-English major students from two classes of Henan University of Science and Technology were chosen as the participants. They were in their second term when they participated in this study. Because they had been graded in their English at the beginning of their college study, their English knowledge level was almost the same. In the way of VKS(Vocabulary Knowledge Scale)produced by Wesche & Paribakht (1996), 26 new words were picked out from 100 ones. Based on the 26 new words, several kinds of exercises were designed. There were two tests to test the effect of the participants'learning result, they were immediate post-test and prolonged post-test. Mainly, the ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and the Paired Samples T Test in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) were used in the analysis of the related data. The research was totally lasted five weeks. There were two chances for the participants to take the treatment each week, fifty minutes once. The selection of target vocabulary and the first treatment were put in the first week, of course. The immediate post-test was taken the day after the first treatment, and the prolonged post-test was taken at the last time of the fifth week.The final results indicated that 1) participants given output plus input task got the best result, 2) participants given the combination of two kind of practices performed better than either the ones given input practice alone or the output practice alone, and 3) participants given output practice alone performed better than the ones given input practice alone. The special point of this study is the combination of two kinds of practice with different orders, especially, the output practice plus input practice. The output plus input practice could first make learners notice their ignorance of the target vocabulary, and then it could let learners have a deeper and further study of the target vocabulary. Through this kind of treatment, the learners could get the best result. This result could prove enough that output was very important and necessary in the acquisition of vocabulary in SLA. So, second language learners could find a more effective way to acquire vocabulary, and at the same time, vocabulary teaching could also get more support from theories and data.