Effects Of Input And Output On Vocabulary Acquisition By Chinese College English Learners

The study aims to explore the effects of input and output on prompting Chinese college students’vocabulary acquisition.It is an empirical quantitative study.After three different kinds of instructions including input-based instruction,output-based instruction and input+output-based instruction on vocabulary, the researcher examined the students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge in the form of test.The paper aims to answer these three questions:1.Does input+output-based instruction result in better receptive knowledge and productive knowledge on vocabulary acquisition, as compared with input-based instruction?2.Does input+output-based instruction result in better receptive knowledge and productive knowledge on vocabulary acquisition,as compared with output-based instruction?3.Does input-based instruction result in better receptive knowledge and productive knowledge on vocabulary acquisition,as compared with output-based instruction?One hundred and thirty-four freshmen of non-English majors attended the experiment, who were randomly divided into three groups.The two treatment groups included input-based group in which the subjects received input instruction and output-based group in which the subjects received output instruction.The control group was input+output-based group in which the subjects received input+output instruction.After different treatments, the subjects attended an immediate test and a delayed test two weeks later. Results and analyses of significant differences made by SPSS11.5were presented respectively for the three research questions. The results showed that:1.learning words in input+output-based instruction led to a similar level of receptive vocabulary knowledge as compared with learning words in input-based instruction alone and output-based instruction alone.2.On one hand the input-based instruction could lead to certain amount of productive knowledge and the output-based instruction could lead to certain amount of receptive knowledge as well.3.The equivalence of type of learning and type of test yielded better results than non-equivalence of type of learning and type of test.4.Productive learning was more difficult than receptive learning from the relatively lower productive vocabulary knowledge test scores. The results might be enlightening for future studies concerning vocabulary acquisition and helpful for second language teachers and students to choose a more effective method of vocabulary learning.