An Empirical Study Of The English Vocabulary Presentation Modes In Terms Of Relevance

Vocabulary, as we have realized in recent years, plays a vitally important role in learning a second language. In vocabulary teaching, the process of showing or introducing new words or expressions to the students is called vocabulary presentation. Presentation is an extremely crucial and necessary step to vocabulary teaching and learning, because efficient presentation modes in class enable the learners to obtain a deeper impression of and richer information about the target words in very limited time so as to make it easier for the target words to enter the long-term memory. This thesis aims to help our teacher find out more effective English vocabulary presentation modes and use them more skillfully and more flexibly.Based on Relevance Theory and inspired by optimal relevance, which is one of the key concepts of Relevance Theory, the present study has investigated and tested, by use of quasi-experiments, the different effects of English vocabulary learning and retention by adopting 5 different presentation modes: 1) presenting words in lexical chunks; 2) presenting words in association; 3) presenting words by stimulating guesses; 4) presenting words by making example sentences; 5) presenting words by the relevant approach (which is a new viewpoint inspired by Relevance Theory). 147 junior high school students who have taken part in both the short-term memory test and the long-term memory test are selected as subjects and 10 English words have been chosen as experimental material. In the experiments, subjects have been given two tests including the short-term memory test immediately after the teacher has finished the presentation stage in class and the long-term memory test a week later in class. We adopt the Statistical Package for Social Sciences 13.0 to analyze the data.After careful design of the experiments and systematic analysis of the data, we get the following major findings: 1) Different English vocabulary presentation modes do have different effects on vocabulary learning of Chinese junior high school students. But up to now, no matter whichever presentation mode is adopted by the teacher, including the relevant approach which we put forward in this study, the retention effect is still not satisfactory enough. This accords with the memory rule that without immediate review, it is easy to forget the newly learned words. The students need to review the target words in time and in a scientific way; 2) There is a lack of an omnipotent presentation mode in any situation. Different vocabulary teaching goals and different characteristics of the target words will influence the teacher to choose different vocabulary presentation mode(s). The ostensive stimulus—the information provided in the vocabulary presentation stage, should be relevant enough with the students' real needs in their lives for it to be worth their efforts to process it as well as should be the most relevant one compatible with the teacher's abilities and preferences; 3) Although we cannot find an omnipotent vocabulary presentation mode, optimal relevance, which is a key concept of Relevance Theory, could be one of the valid criteria for our teachers to choose effective presentation mode(s). In the thesis we put forward a new presentation mode which is called the relevant approach inspired by the concept of optimal relevance, but it is just a new perspective to probe the problem of how to present English vocabulary more effectively rather than a totally new specific presentation mode. It is not superior to other specific presentation modes, but matures with the emerging of new specific presentation modes and the development of linguistics and psychology.