An Expeirmental Study On Combining Explicit And Implicit Vocabulary Instruction For Rural Junior High School Students

Vocabulary occupies a very prominent status in a given language. Ellis (1994:11)treats vocabulary as “the bedrock of L2”. Although students, teachers, and researchersall agree that learning vocabulary is an essential part of mastering a second or foreignlanguage, but as pointed out by de Groot (2006), the best means of achieving goodvocabulary learning is still unclear. Whether words should be taught directly or can belearned from various contexts draws much attention. In China, relevant studies wereoften conducted in colleges and urban senior high schools. The rural junior highschools, where learners are confronting more learning difficulties, were seldomattended to. By adding implicit learning activities to explicit instruction environment,the present study probes into the effect of combining explicit and implicit vocabularyinstruction for rural young learners.As the theoretical support of the study, some memory theories are introduced.Vocabulary learning is a cognitive process. Learning activities, either implicit orexplicit, leave traces on learners’ memory. However, the types of stimuli and the timesof stimuli in learning have different effect on the retention of those traces. Moreover,different stimuli appeal to different groups of learners.The present research is guided by the following questions:a. Will students under combined vocabulary instruction outperform those underonly explicit instruction in immediate vocabulary tests?b. Will students under combined vocabulary instruction outperform those underonly explicit instruction in delayed vocabulary tests?A total of98students of Grade Seven participated in the experiment. In a regularreading lesson, the control group received explicit instruction which consists ofrepeated pronunciation, marginal glossing, vocabulary exercise and word copying.The experimental group were given extra opportunities to listen to the passage whilereading. After reading, they were assigned to complete a comprehension task. Inaddition, the experimental group listened to two stories selected from the graded reader Book Worm and watched related video clips every week, while the controlgroup were told to learn the word by rote. Both group were tested immediately afterthe reading lesson on receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. Two weekslater, a delayed test, using the same paper as the immediate test, was administered toexamine the retention of vocabulary knowledge. Altogether, three rounds of tests wereexecuted. The data were processed by SPSS. Independent Sample T-test and PairedSample T-test were adopted. In each test, the experimental group outperformed thecontrol group. As the experiment proceeded, the gap of receptive knowledge betweenthem enlarged. Significant difference was found in the second and the third delayedreceptive vocabulary tests. From the results of delayed productive vocabulary tests,the maintenance effect of the combined instruction can also be concluded.The study suggests that both explicit and implicit elements should be included ina vocabulary learning program and the program should be long-term, making thelearning recurrent and onward.