An Empirical Research Of Senior English Vocabulary Acquisition Under The Teaching Model Of Example Sentences

Vocabulary is one of the three important elements of the language and is basic in learningEnglish. One of the main problems encountered by high school students in learning English isvocabulary. What’s more, vocabulary teaching is the main way for students to master theEnglish vocabulary, and its importance has caused widespread concern of the domestic andforeign researchers. The thesis mainly describes the application of example sentence invocabulary teaching and its effects on vocabulary acquisition.According to Sousa (2006), learners’ ability to retain information is dependent on the typeof teaching method to a large extent. Some methods result in more acquisition of learningthan others. Therefore, the way of vocabulary teaching can have a great effect on learners’vocabulary acquisition.In light of this, the present study is an attempt to examine the effects of different examplesentence types (mainly teacher-written example sentences and dictionary-based examplesentences) on L2vocabulary acquisition, as well as whether the effects will differ betweenusing different types of vocabulary presentation methods (i.e., meaning-inferred method andmeaning-given method). The instruments mainly used in this empirical study are as follows:questionnaire, tests and face-to-face interviews. The participants involved in this study were70senior high students from Xinxiang experimental high school. The following researchquestions are addressed in this study:1. To what extent do the dictionary-based example sentences and the teacher-written examplesentences influence vocabulary acquisition with meaning-inferred method?2. To what extent do the dictionary-based example sentences and the teacher-written examplesentences influence vocabulary acquisition with meaning-given method? The major findings of this study are as follows:When meaning-inferred method is used, the teacher-written example sentences have asignificantly positive impact on L2vocabulary retention in the immediate test, while they alsohave a significantly positive effect on L2vocabulary acquisition in the delayed test. Secondly,when meaning-given method is used, the teacher-written example sentences have less effecton L2vocabulary acquisition than in meaning-inferred method.In view of the finding that the example sentence types (dictionary-based examplesentences and teacher-written example sentences) have significant effects on learners’acquisition. It gives us the implication that teachers should adopt some methods to enlargelearners’ L2vocabulary. So the teacher-written example sentences should be given the priorityover the dictionary-based example sentences.The findings of the present study shed some light on L2vocabulary teaching and EFL(English as a foreign language) research as well.