A Study On The Effects Of Instructional Types On Second Language Vocabulary Learning

Second language vocabulary acquisition has become an increasingly interesting topicfor discussion over the years for researchers, teachers, curriculum designers, theorists, andothers involved in second language learning. The main focus of related studies has been onvaried aspects of incidental L2vocabulary learning, whereas little work has beenconducted, to the best knowledge of the researcher, on the effect of different ways ofinstruction on L2vocabulary retention, and much less has been done on the effects ofcontrastive form-focused instruction in China.In the light of the above, the present study, which is based on Laufer and Girsai’s(2008) study, attempts to further investigate the effect of different instructional types on theacquisition of single words and collocations by Chinese EFL learners. The participants ofthis study were81second-year English majors from three parallel intact classes in one ofthe key universities in Jiangsu Province. The three classes were each randomly assigned toa different type of instruction condition designed for the study:(1) meaning-focusedinstruction (MFI);(2) non-contrastive form-focused instruction;(3) contrastive analysisand translation (CAT). The target vocabulary included ten unfamiliar words and tenunfamiliar collocations in English. The MFI class performed content-oriented tasks whichdid not require conscious attention to the target items. The FFI class performed text-basedvocabulary tasks which focused on the target items. The CAT class performed text-basedtranslation tasks: from English to Chinese, and from Chinese to English. During thecorrection stage, the researcher provided a contrastive analysis of the target vocabulary andtheir L1translation options. After they completed the tasks, the three classes were tested ontheir retention of the target vocabulary by the active recall and passive recall. Theparticipants did the same tests a week later, and then a follow-up face-to-face interviewwas carried out to gather further evidence.The quantitative data of both the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test wereanalyzed by statistic package SPSS16.0. The results show that there is significant difference between the scores of the three classes, namely, the contrastive analysis andtranslation class scored significantly higher than the other two classes in all tests, and themeaning-focused class got the lowest score in all the posttests.The results are discussed inlight of the “noticing hypothesis”,“output hypothesis”,“involvement load hypothesis”.The results of the interview also support the findings derived from the quantitative data. Itis suggested that there is indeed a place for contrastive analysis and translation activities insecond language vocabulary learning and second language learners may benefit fromcontrastive form-focused instruction.