Improving Primary School Students' Vocabulary Learning Through Multi-sensory Instructional Strategies

Among language learners, the acquisition of vocabulary has long been felt to be a crucial component of learning a foreign language.During years of personal English teaching experiences, the author have noticed that vocabulary retention is a real challenge to the young learners at primary level, especially to those students whose learning style is tactile or kinesthetic. The author's students' records of the weekly vocabulary tests can be the evidence for the problem.This study aimed at exploring whether a multi-sensory teaching approach to vocabulary instruction would have a positive impact on vocabulary achievement on the basis of teacher's better understanding and consideration of students' different learning styles. It was hypothesized that by using multi-sensory teaching strategies in English classrooms, students' learning efficiency as well as their vocabulary test results could be improved; Students' motivation on English learning could be improved as well, especially those so-called "at-risk" students whose learning styles are mainly tactile or kinesthetic.The research employed a comparative experiment method. Subjects were 78 fourth-graders in Beijing Primary School, -- a boarding school in Xuanwu District. The students belonged to two classes, one is the control group, and the other is the experimental sample. A pretest of 30 high frequently used words learnt from the former term was given to all the 78 students at the beginning of the experiment. During the research, students in the experimental sample were taught mainly with a multi-sensory approach, including some of the conventional verbal-linguistic teaching...