The Application Study Of Semantic Association In English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary plays an important role in language learning. It is an essential part in all language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, when students talk about learning vocabulary, they feel that it is a headache to remember them, particularly to the students of vocational institutes, because of their special characters such as their poor English learning foundation, lack of good study habits and shortage of proper vocabulary learning strategies. So, vocational institute students have more difficulties in English vocabulary learning than regular students in other colleges. Therefore, it is extremely important for vocational institute students to develop some suitable vocabulary learning strategies.The research of vocabulary is attracting more and more concern in applied linguistics, particularly in vocabulary learning. The thesis is intended to explore semantic association in terms of its effect on vocabulary learning. The related theories concerning this research come from the perspectives of linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and vocabulary learning strategy. At the same time, the author reviewed related studies on semantic association at home and abroad. Semantic association comes from the establishment of various image relationships between pronunciation, word form and meanings through all kinds of association strategies, which can combine the former and latter related knowledge about the vocabulary organically and also aid in the memory of vocabulary effectively. This study has specified semantic association by resorting to paradigmatic relations, syntagmatic relations and the analysis of the memory characteristics, so as to investigate the relationships between the semantic association, vocabulary learning and memory.70 sophomore students, who come from Inner Mongolia Vocational Institute of Economy, Trade & Foreign Languages, participated in the study. The training materials included the vocabulary in the first five units of New College English (second edition) Book Three and some CET4 vocabulary. The students all received the same materials. Two classes were chosen as the subjects, Class 1 as the Control Class, and class 2 as the Experimental Class. 30 students of the Control Class received traditional vocabulary teaching, while 30 of the Experimental Class received a four-month training of semantic association. The semantic association experiment lasted about 16 weeks. From pre-test to post-test, the author collected all the related statistics. SPSS 13.0 was used to analyze the raw data quantitatively, and the following conclusions were reached in the study:(1) Semantic association helps learners to remember vocabulary effectively and to convert their short-term memory into long-term memory.(2) Semantic association can help learners to collect vocabulary concerning a particular field.(3) Semantic association used by experimental-class students remarkably enlarges their vocabulary size.In a word, semantic association is an effective vocabulary learning strategy. The findings of the study provide a new perspective on vocabulary learning strategy, and meanwhile, the significance of the study can be viewed as a useful step for further research.