A Study On The Effectiveness Of The Principle Of Meaning And Form In The Acquisition Of L2 Vocabulary

Vocabulary, one of the most important language components, is the foundation of all other English language skills. On account of the significance of vocabulary, an increasing number of researchers attach great importance to the areas of L2vocabulary. Focus on Form(FOF), a kind of instructional option put forward by Long, has already proved to be effective in grammar teaching and learning by a number of theoretical and empirical studies. However, there are few studies about the application of FOF instruction into the vocabulary learning. According to Laufer(2003), now that meaning-focused learning does not necessarily contribute to a satisfactory vocabulary development, then a FOF component should be incorporated into vocabulary acquisition.Under this premise, this research is aimed at researching the effectiveness of FOF instruction on L2vocabulary acquisition and providing more effective classroom pedagogical approaches to help students enhance their L2vocabulary acquisition. Accordingly, this study is designed to pursue answers to the following two questions:1. Will FOF (Focus on Form) activities help students to acquire a significantly larger number of lexical items than FOM and FOFs activities in the immediate post-test?2. Will FOF activities help students to acquire a significantly larger number of lexical items than FOM and FOFs activities in the delayed post-test?Altogether90Senior Two students learning English as a foreign language participated in the experiment. Coming from three parallel classes,they are equally competent in English proficiency and learning abilities. Three classes were assigned at random to one of the three conditions:thirty for FOM group, thirty for FOF group and thirty for FOFs group. According to the experimental conditions they are assigned to, the three groups receive different activities. Another30students of similar English proficiency took part in a pre-test to make sure that the target items are totally new to the participants. Students in the FOM condition were exposed to the reading text containing the target items. After reading, the participants were asked to finish two communicative tasks:reading comprehension and group discussion, which were based on the understanding of the whole passage rather than the learning of the target items. In the FOF condition, the participants were exposed to the same-reading text just as the FOM group, but the target items were underlined. After reading, participants in this group were also asked to complete two tasks: reading comprehension and a task-based reading using underlined target items. Different from FOM condition, answering these questions required comprehension of the target items. The participants in FOFs condition received a list of the20target items with their translations instead of reading the text used in the other two groups. The participants in this group worked on a word-focused exercise, which includes choosing the correct meaning of the word from four options. After the activities were finished, all the three groups received an immediate post-test unexpectedly and a delayed post-test one week later. The experimental results show that two form-focused groups:FOF and FOFs performed better than FOM group in both immediate and delayed post-tests.Therefore, the author drew a conclusion from three aspects. Firstly, all the three groups (FOM group, FOF group and FOFs groups) acquired new vocabulary to different extent, but the FOM group got the lowest scores in three tests; Secondly, all the students do much better in Test1(translation from L2-L1) than the Test2&3(translation from L1-L2),which indicates that the learners accept the passive knowledge more easily and at a faster speed than the active knowledge; Thirdly, compared with the FOFs group, FOF group performed better in the retention of vocabulary, thus a combination of meaning and form of L2language could be a more efficient way in second language vocabulary acquision.