A Study Of Effects Of Collaborative Output On English Vocabulary Acquisition For College Students

Teachers and scholars have gradually paid much attention to vocabulary acquisition.This thesis reports an empirical study on the effects of collaborative output activities on second language acquisition. It tends to explore how Swain′s Output Hypothesis was related to vocabulary learning, and how teaching tasks can be effectively designed and implemented.The study was implemented in a college in Fuzhou,Jiangxi Province. Subjects were non-English majors from three natural first year classes,twenty of whom were chosen from each class according to their vocabulary test scores, serving as the Experimental Group 1, the Experimental Group 2 and the Control group respectively. First, the subjects were exposed to two reading texts including the ten target words in bold font, the teacher used the traditional method which is to translate each sentence into Chinese for the students, and gave necessary explanations including meaning, forms and spellings of the target words. Next, the control group did the comprehension tasks while the experimental group1 did the text reconstruction in oral form with the target words collaboratively in pairs, and Experimental Group 2 did the text reconstruction in written form with the target words collaboratively in pairs. Then posttest 1 on vocabulary recognition were given immediately, students were required to finish in five minutes. After five minutes, posttest 2 on vocabulary production were given, students were required to finish in five minutes,too. A week later, in the same way, posttest 3 on vocabulary recognition and posttest 4 on vocabulary production were given respectively. The results of four posttests were analyzed by SPSS 17.0.There were two major findings. First, the experimental groups did better than the control group no matter in terms of productive or receptive gains in word meanings. Second, three groups′productive knowledge of word meanings lost more quickly than receptive knowledge. It suggests that collaborative output tasks need to be done frequently so as to help retain productive knowledg better. The results of the experiment indicates that collaborative_output activities have better effect than comprehension_based input activities do on vocabulary recognition and production. And such findings support Swain′s(1985,1995)claim that collaborative output promotes noticing. They also have important implications for vocabulary teaching. Teachers should pay more attention to the collaborative output activities instead of input alone.