Psychological Proximity And Depth Of Processing In EFL Vocabulary Learning

This study is an empirical study designed to examine the psychological reality of the construct"psychological proximity"in L2 vocabulary acquisition and to explore the relationship between learners'psychological proximity and the depth of processing of the word they learned. During the study, effort has also been made to try to tie down the influences which might be imposed on the learning process by several characteristics: the frequency, concreteness of meaning and parts of speech of the target words used in the experiment. The subjects of the experiment include 15 sophomores and 2 freshmen of Japanese major students from Hunan University, who were required to accomplish both a word learning task individually on computer given by a pre-designed computer program, within which questions indicating students'psychological proximity toward the target words were put forward as well, and a printed test of the learned word delayed until a week after the learning took place. Interviews were also employed occasionally during the experiment. The statistical techniques adopted in this study are descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and One-Way ANOVA. Through the interpretation of the results, we have the following findings:First, in the present study, the psychological proximity of learners to certain target words in learning varies in a pattern that certain category enjoys a more proximate feeling than others. Certain words were considered as more proximate compared with others.Second, the depth of processing is generally negatively correlated with learners'psychological proximity, although this correlation is not strong enough for psychological proximity to be a powerful predictor of DOP.Third, learners'psychological proximity differentiates in accordance with the frequency of target word of learning.Fourth, learners'psychological proximity differentiates with reference to the concreteness of target word of learning.Fifth, learners'psychological proximity is not strongly influenced by different part of speech of target words.Based on the findings of the research, we have the following implications for the teaching and learning of English words:First, the choice of vocabulary learning materials should take into account of learners'psychological proximity. To improve learners'psychological proximity for better processing of target words, the influential characteristics should be taken into consideration such as word frequency and concreteness, as well as some socio-cultural background. Teacher should give instructions paying attention especially to words which are less proximate to learners.Second, learners should adjust their own learning of vocabulary according to their proximity to target words. For words they feel not so proximate to, additional attention should be paid aiming for deeper processing on these words, which could be achieved in various ways to reduce the negative influence from the increasing of the value of psychological proximity; while for proximate words, learners should make use of their"good feeling"toward them to facilitate their learning.