Two College English Vocabulary Acquisition Approaches And Their Revelation To Reading Performance

Vocabulary learning has long had a synergistic association with reading; each activity nourishes the other. It has been viewed more and more important. But questions, such as"How best to teach vocabulary?","How to reduce such a heavy vocabulary load?"and"How to learn English more effectively when learners want to have the threshold vocabulary in order to be able to pass their college English test?"etc. are presented in front of vocational college English teachers.The purpose of this survey is, by standing on giants'shoulders, to build a better understanding of the relationship between them by studying the effectiveness of two college English vocabulary acquisition approaches to reading performance in vocational college students.It is a quasi-experimental study; to achieve better internal and external validity, we selected first-year vocational college students, who had just finished their high school education, as our subjects. One of the two approaches is a threshold vocabulary concentration program, in which words are committed to memory in a short period of time; the other a traditional words acquisition program, namely, the Grammar Translation Method, in which words are taught and learned gradually according to the order of the texts. In both approaches comprehensive reading is needed. In order to verify that the new approach is superior to the contrast one, we tested the subjects twice with the same College English Test paper (band 4), and analyzed the collected data with SPSS13.0.At the beginning of the thesis, we reviewed the history of second Language vocabulary instruction. Next, we illuminated in detail"why we focus on vocabulary"and"why on reading"to get better view of the new approach. Finally, we threw highlight on results in order to explore a better approach for vocabulary learning.From research, the paper is able to answer the questions presented above. It demonstrates that an improvement in reading comprehension can be attributed to an increase in vocabulary size. And the paper also confirms that vocabulary can be acquired through extensive reading, and can speed up English learning by increasing reading proficiency. So it clearly supports the hypothesis that threshold vocabulary concentration approach combined with comprehensible reading is more effective than traditional method and sustains the theories of vocabulary and reading brought forward by our vocabulary acquisition pioneers.