An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Different Learning Conditions On BE Vocabulary Retention By Chinese Adult Learners

In China,more and more colleges of various levels have provided various business English(BE) courses to gear to social demands.However,many serious problems exist in present business English teaching and learning,among which problems in BE vocabulary teaching and learning should not be ignored.As we all know,English vocabulary is the essential aspect of the language,so BE vocabulary learning is the key to mastering Business English and the major concern of Business English teachers and learners.Nowadays,a lot of BE teachers adopt the same teaching strategies as those adopted in general English vocabulary teaching,and BE students adopt the same learning methods as those adopted in general English vocabulary learning.Many theorists and researchers have argued that there are positive outcomes from the use of contexts to help learners to receive target words while others held that word list was more effective.This thesis sets out to examine the effect of different learning conditions (comprehensible BE context,obscure BE context and BE word list) on business English(BE) vocabulary retention of Chinese adult learners,with the retention of word meaning as the focus.Although the view that the use of context is important for the complete acquisition of the various aspects of word knowledge of general English(GE) has gained some empirical support,the discussion on its effectiveness for vocabulary retention seems not so clear-cut.And the study in the field of business English(BE) vocabulary is even rare.This thesis thus tries to contribute to the research into this field.According to some researchers'argumentations like that of De Beaugrande (1980),ONLY TEXTS,not sentences,can fully represent the actual system of language context.Therefore,the author defines the business context as business texts in English.In this thesis the guessing strategy will be adopted to verify the effect of BE context and the comparison between comprehensible BE text,obscure BE text and BE word list will be made in terms of retention amount in both the immediate test and postponed tests.Based on theories and findings,the research hypothesis has been raised that for the learning,especially retention of BE vocabulary,the use of comprehensible BE text leads to better retention effect than the use of BE word list and obscure BE text.In order to avoid aptitude variable,a within-subjects repeated-measures ANOVA design is adopted.A class of 30 adults who are studying business English(BE) in GDUFS College of Continuing Education attended the experiment,and each student was required to learn the same number of BE words with the guessing stage under 3 learning conditions—comprehensible BE text,obscure BE text and BE word list—in 15 minutes respectively.These test subjects then received an immediate recognition test 2 minutes after learning and memorizing stage,and two postponed tests 7 and 14 days later respectively.The experiment results reveal that comprehensible BE text facilitated BE vocabulary retention both immediately and after delays of 7 and 14 days better than obscure BE text and BE word list.Taking the favorable influence of comprehensible BE context on the retention of meaning of BE vocabulary into consideration,effect of comprehensible BE context,generally speaking,is found to be positive for acquisition of BE vocabulary.Practically,the findings of the present study give BE teachers some implications on BE vocabulary teaching.Further studies need to be done to investigate whether the BE context has a positive effect on other word knowledge such as BE vocabulary spelling,involving more subjects and other contextual strategies.