A Comparative Study Of Strategies Of Vocabulary Learning Methods：Word List Reciting And Sentences Writing

Vocabulary is one of the essential parts in language learning."Knowing a word" involves various aspects, such as the word’s spelling and meaning, the receptive and productive knowledge of the word, etc. Many researchers have done plenty of experiments and researches on vocabulary learning strategies, such as the taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies listed by Schmitt (1997), but there is still large room for the study of the function of the methods of acquiring new words. This study, with the guidance of the theories of memory and hypothesis of depth of processing and the involvement loading, aims to make a comparison of the effect of the two ways of learning vocabulary, i.e. word list reciting and by sentences writing, in terms of the memorizing and retaining of new vocabulary.With the introduction of the background, significance and the aim of the study at the very beginning, this paper also reviews some previous studies on the methods of word list reciting and by sentence writing. Although many researches have been conducted on the principles and functions of these two methods, no unanimous conclusion has been reached in terms of the advantages analysis of them. In the theoretical framework, some theories are introduced as the guideline of this study such as the Depth of Processing Hypothesis, which claims that deeper memory trace of the certain vocabulary can be brought by analysis, organization and recognition of the words; the Involvement Load Hypothesis which proposes that the need, search, and evaluation are three factors affecting the depth of processing; and the memory mechanisms that suggests rehearsal and elaboration, which are two different ways to memorise, can bring different effect on memorization, so vocabulary studied by elaborative rehearsal may have more possibility of entering into long-term memory than vocabulary studied by maintenance rehearsal. In order to find out the advantages and disadvantages of these two learning strategies an experiment was conducted in two group of students and the results of experiments turned to be that the pupils who learning vocabulary by word list have higer scores in immediate post-test than those learning vocabulary by sentences writing, which can indicate that word list reciting has better effect on short-term memory, but when it comes to the delayed post-test, the scores got by the two groups are the another way around, which indicates that learning vocabulary by sentence writing has better effect on long-term memory or on vocabulary retaining. This result is also in line with the findings in questionnaires and the tested pupils thought they could remember the processes of making sentence much clearer than the words only on list form. Therefore, based on the guideline theories and with the analysis of the results of the experiments it can be concluded that the vocabulary learning strategy of sentence writing has better effect on vocabulary retention than that of word list.