An Empirical Study Of Words Association In College English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary learning is of great importance in language learning. The research about how second language learners can master vocabulary learning is obviously very important. To the freshmen in college, the changes of the learning methods, the learning material and the learning environments make it difficult to master the large amount of new words, which obstruct their English development. Because of the influence of the communicative language learning, to learn vocabulary from context becomes the main topic of most vocabulary researches. Many researchers put emphases on the importance of context in incidental vocabulary learning. However, the results are not satisfactory even though great efforts have been put in vocabulary learning and teaching. So, to find a method which can solve this problem is necessary.The present paper tries to study the relation between words association strategy and the results of vocabulary learning from the perspectives of mental lexicon, relations of words association, vocabulary memorization and forgetting, vocabulary retrieval. The author chooses two classes—the control class (CC) and the experimental class (EC), with 30 subjects in each class respectively. After the training of 14 weeks, the author uses questionnaire and vocabulary tests to discover the differences between EC and CC before and after the experiment. In the end, the different results are analyzed by SPSS 10.0, which testifies the importance of words association strategy in vocabulary learning.This thesis testifies the feasibility of the strategy of words association in theory and draws a positive conclusion after carrying out the experiment in real classroom, which lays a good foundation for the use of words association in vocabulary learning, and is helpful to the freshmen in vocabulary learning.