An Empirical Study On The Application Of Information Processing Theory In College English Vocabulary Teaching

The syllabus of the college English teaching is required to develop the students’ability of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, while vocabulary teaching isclosely related to the five aspects of ability, so vocabulary teaching is very important inEnglish teaching.Since the1970s, when the psychologists who study information processing studyhuman’s learning and memory, they compare the human learning process as process ofinformation processing. Information processing theory thinks that memory is to encodeinformation. If the information is attended, it goes into the short-term memory and stores inthe form of semantics, and then enters into long-term memory after retelling, fineprocessing, coding and so on. Cognitive learning theory of Information processing thinksthat the essence of human cognition is process of information processing, so learningprocess of English vocabulary is process of information processing.According to Information Processing Theory which is put forward by Gagne, thethesis mainly studies that different stages of processing of English vocabulary use differentvocabulary learning strategies, so that the students can use proper strategies to learn wordsin different stages of vocabulary processing. That is to say, students can process vocabularywhen they remember words, namely, attention—formal processing—deep processing—output processing. The thesis further discusses how to apply this theory to college Englishvocabulary teaching. This thesis puts forward the following three questions:(1) Are thestudents more proficient in vocabulary?(2) Do the students get more effective vocabularylearning strategies?(3) Is the interest of English vocabulary learning improved?The participants in this experiment are two classes of64non-English major seniorstudents from Arts and Science College of Bohai University. Before the experiment, onequestionnaire is conducted in two classes in order to learn the situation of the strategyusage. After the experiment, the same questionnaire is only used in experimental class inorder to learn if the situation of strategy usage is improved after one-term training. Theauthor also carries out test before and after experiment in order to testify whethervocabulary proficiency is improved guided by guided by Information Processing Theory.After the experiment, the author interviews ten students who are chosen at random inexperimental class to learn if the interest of vocabulary learning is improved.After data collection and analysis, the author gets the following conclusions:(1) Thestudents are more proficient in vocabulary learning.(2) The students get more effectivevocabulary learning strategies.(3) The learning interest of English vocabulary is improved. At last, the author puts forward some pedagogical suggestions. It is expected that theyare helpful for further study in the field of vocabulary teaching.