Effects Of Different Presentation Ways On Vocabulary Retention

Vocabulary teaching has rapidly changed in status from 'a neglected aspect of language learning' (Meara, 1980) to an area of growing attention and research. In China, vocabulary research is mainly focused on vocabulary learning nowadays; however, vocabulary teaching plays an important role, for English as a foreign language in China is formally taught in the classroom.In this paper, we mainly focus our attention on the vocabulary presentation in English teaching of junior high school. We believe that different ways of vocabulary presentation help produce different results in vocabulary gams and retentions. We choose the following five presentation ways: presentation in association, presentation in context, presentation with semantic elaboration, presentation in lexical chunks, and presentation by stimulating guesses, for experiment so as to check our assumption.After careful design and data analysis, we have the following findings: 1) Different presentation ways have different effects on vocabulary learning of Chinese junior high school students; 2) Presentation by stimulating guesses and presentation in association work effectively both in the immediate and the delayed tests; 3) Presentation in lexical chunks and presentation with semantic elaboration are not so helpful as indicated both in the immediate and delayed tests; 4) Presentation in context works effectively in the immediate test while it does not promote vocabulary retentions in the delayed test. We believe that presentation ways that can help build up association between previous knowledge and the new and that can promote students' involvement in the learning process are effective and suitable for high school students.