A Study On Tertiary-Level English Vocabulary Teaching Assisted By Concept Map & WordNet

The thesis set out to explore a new technical approach to college English vocabulary teaching which is assisted by concept map and WordNet. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied in the study. A comparison was carried out between concept map and WordNet-aided vocabulary learning on one hand, and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading on the other. Below are the major findings:1) Compared with incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading, concept map and WordNet-aided vocabulary learning has a more positive effect on improving participants' vocabulary size. Concept map can help teacher to teach vocabulary and also can help students to learn vocabulary more effectively, though both approaches to vocabulary teaching are found to positive influence participants' vocabulary growth.2) Compared with incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading, concept map and WordNet-aided vocabulary learning has a more positive effect on improving participants' language proficiency. Concept map can help participants increase their language proficiency more effectively through constructing the text concept map to gain a clear understanding about the content of the passage, though these two different vocabulary learning strategies are found to facilitate participants' language proficiency increase.The positive effect of this new technical approach to vocabulary teaching can be attributed to the following two reasons:1) Since vocabulary is stored in our mind in a semantic network, constructing concept map in vocabulary learning can facilitate the activation of various semantic relations among words in the mind, which greatly promotes the learners' deep processing of vocabulary;2) Words are usually related to one another in the form of cohesions in the context. Constructing concept map of vocabulary in the text can make more salient these interrelations among words in the text, which will enhance the participants' language proficiency.The thesis is composed of 6 parts. The first part introduces research orientation, research rationale and key research questions. The second part reviews studies on the existing vocabulary learning strategies: incidental vocabulary learning and associate vocabulary learning strategies, and then briefly introduces the present research of concept map. The third part is the theoretical frameworks of the research: first, reviewed several theories related to this research i.e., semantic network theory, cohesion theory, association network theory, connectionism, then briefly introduces WordNet Software. The fourth part mainly introduces subjects, material, instruments, experimental procedure and the data collection. The fifth part analyzes related data and presents a discussion on the major findings of this study. The sixth part sums up the main findings and further suggestion, the implication, significance and limitations of the research as well as the future study orientation.