Cultural Factors In ESL Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is a basic material in building language and essential unit for expressing ideas, while vocabulary learning and mastering of its accuracy take predominant place in language learning. Since the 1980s of the last century, the Vocabulary Acquisition (VA) has been a central subject in Applied Linguistic. It is not easy for the language learners to get the precise meaning of a new word in foreign language learning.The theory of VA was presented by British psychologists at first, but it seemed that serious study of VA traced back in 1980 when P. Meara (1980) issued his paper Vocabulary Acquisition: a neglected area in language learning in language Teaching and Linguistics and summarized the research conditions concerning vocabulary control, vocabulary memory and related vocabulary experiments. From then on, some linguists, such as Stern (1983), McCarthy(1984), Laufer(1986), Carter(1987), Gass(1988) and Maiguashca (1993), wrote papers on this topic continuously and pointed out the importance of VA research emphatically. In 1990, New Zealand linguist P. Nation published Teaching & Learning Vocabulary, which was divided into 12 parts and elaborated vocabulary teaching, vocabulary learning, estimation and VA and some other problems. Laufer (1990) states that VA means being familiar with all implicate meanings of a word, knowing how to use it under whatever proper conditions and its areas of collocation, while understanding the relationship between the word and other one within the framework of same vocabulary meaning.Until recently, the study on VA is just in the ascendant. Although VA is a very complicated problem, the language researchers still study it from various aspects. For example, Gui Shichun (1992) investigated the relationship of psychological vocabulary between English and Chinese and came to some valuable results. The problem of vocabulary pronunciation coding for the ESL learner is also explored by Gui Shuichun and Li Wei (1992) . Wang Wenyu (1998) conduct research on the memorizing strategy of English vocabulary for Chinese. Wu Xia and Wang Qiang (1998) estimated the strategy and influence of English vocabulary made by non-English major students.It is obvious that the cultural and language differences between Chinese learners and native-English speakers are much greater than the differences between Indo-European...