The Effect Of The Opportunity For Word Retrieval On The Chinese EFL Learners' Retention Of The Newly Learnt Words

In recent years the effect of word retrieval on second vocabulary learning has received much attention from second language acquisition researchers. Royer (1973) and McNamara & Healy (1995) claimed that the word retrieval opportunity has positive effect on vocabulary learning. However, the effect of retrieval on vocabulary learning needs more evidence due to limited target words and research methods of previous research.Based on the theory of memory mechanism, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of opportunity for word retrieval during picture-based EFL vocabulary learning on the learners'retention of the newly learnt words. To be specific, this study addressed the following three questions: 1) Does the opportunity to retrieve newly learnt words affect the retention of these words during picture-based EFL vocabulary learning? If so, 2) Is the effect of the opportunity to retrieve newly learnt words on the retention of these words positive or negative? 3) Does the opportunity to retrieve newly learnt words have a short-term or long-term effect on the retention of these words?An experiment was administrated to answer the above questions. 111 non-English majors from two classes in Grade One in one of the universities in Chongqing participated in the experiment. Each participant attempted to learn half of the target words in the retrieval oriented condition, while the other half of target words in the non-retrieval oriented condition. After the experiment, the participants took two posttests: an immediate posttest right after the experiment and a delayed posttest one week later after the experiment. Data were submitted to SPSS 12.0 and analyzed by repeated measures of ANOVA.The results show that the opportunity for word retrieval not only has a positive short-term effect on the learners'retention of the newly learnt words but also has a long-term effect on that. The findings suggest that retrieval of newly learnt words has positive effect on learners'retention of these words in the EFL context just as it does in the L2 context(Royer,1973;McNamara & Healy,1995). The results also imply that the memory mechanism, forgetting curve and retrieval should be taken into account during vocabulary teaching and course design.