| Many EFL learners worry about how to tackle the formidable task of learning many thousands of words. But EFL students are often presented much of their new English vocabulary preorganized for them in 'semantic cluster', sets of semantically and syntactically similar words, e.g. nose, mouth, ear, chin. (Tinkham, 1997). At first glance, clustering of this sort facilitates vocabulary learning and seems to facilitate the activities, which serve the current approaches to language teaching as well. However, growing body of research indicates that this way of presenting new vocabulary is making learning much more difficult than it should be. And according to Interference theory and the study conducted by Tinkham in 1993, 1997 and Waring in 1997 and Nation in 2000 that learning vocabulary in semantic cluster would impede rather than enhance learning.On a more positive note, a more 'thematic' manner of organizing new L2 vocabulary is suggested by more recent psychological research which would predict that clusters like frog, green, hop, pond, slippery, croak would be more easily learnt than groups of unassociated words. (Tinkham, 1997).The present study, as a close replication of Tinkham's, use real English words paired with Chinese equivalents in the attempt to find a main effect of learning semantically related words at the same time and main effect of learning thematically related words at the same time for L2 learners. To be brief, the present study aims at examining the following questions:1. Do L2 students learn semantic clusters of new words with more difficulty than they learn sets of unrelated words?2. Do L2 students learn thematic clusters of new L2 vocabulary more easily than they learn sets of unassociated words?The subjects of the Experiment are non-major juniors from one university of Lanzhou. The experiments in the present study consisted of two studies; both of them will conduct in the written modality. One study involves the task of recognizing new...
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