Effects Of After-reading Activities On Vocabulary Acquisition

In the field of vocabulary acquisition, many scholars at home or abroad all agree and support that read plus vocabulary-enhancement activities can play an important role in vocabulary acquisition, and what's more, some scholars have conducted various kinds of empirical researches to investigate this view. Therefore, the corresponding vocabulary exercises cause a variety of different conclusions.In the current study, 96 subjects were divided into two groups. The first group was required to do vocabulary-enhancement activities after reading the passages, while the second group was only required to do reading comprehension exercises after reading. Then the difference between the two groups was compared to test the efficiency of the two ways in vocabulary acquisition and retention. In the first group, they were required to finish writing two summaries of two different articles collaboratively and individually, and then the results of the two ways were analyzed by the subjects'self-report. In the second group, the subjects were required to reading comprehension exercises in two different forms, multiple choice and true-or-false statements, and thus to compare the two forms of reading comprehension exercises could affect learners'vocabulary acquisition and retention within the control group or not. Through a series of tests in the experiments, the current research gained the following findings.Reading plus vocabulary-enhancement activities could improve learners'acquisition and retention than those only engaging in reading comprehension exercises. The collaborative way of writing summary was more effective than the individual way in vocabulary acquisition and retention. Within the control group, there was no significant difference between the two forms of reading comprehension exercises, which offered a positive support of the correctness of Laufer's"involvement load"hypothesis. Finally, some pedagogical implications were drawn from the current study in second language teaching in higher technical and vocational college. In English reading class, the vocabulary-enhance activities could enable students to pay more attention to the target words which were needed to be memorized. The collaborative tasks could provide learners more chances to participate in the learning activities actively because this way required learners to make more efforts in vocabulary acquisition and long-term memory. Inevitably, there were some limitations in the current study. The learnability of the target words to the participants, the difficulties and length of the two articles and the factors of participants'motivation and learning strategies adopted in reading could affect the results in vocabulary acquisition and retention, which all needed to be investigated in further research.