Impact Of Vocabulary Acquisition On English Writing

Any language is a set of conventional sound system established on the basis of words. In order to learn a foreign language well, vocabulary acquisition is one of the most important conditions for second language learners. Meanwhile, it is also a barrier for them to overcome. Both at home and abroad this phenomenon has been commonly noticed before by scholars, who have done researches on vocabulary acquisition strategies, process and dependency from different angles, and made quite a few valuable achievements. Combining the former’s achievements and the present practical teaching, the author has found that in the course of college English teaching, a large number of non-English major students show such a problem as the amount of English vocabulary is too large for them to learn by heart, which seriously reduced their English learning interests. Thus based on the knowledge of vocabulary depth and breadth, especially Craik and Lockhard’s vocabulary depth processing theory, this thesis mainly aims to make a case study of Non-English Major Students’ Lexical Acquisition affecting their writing level. Relevant data show that vocabulary acquisition has a positive correlation to English writing.In order to ensure the objectivity of the present study, we chose sophomores of Hunan Agricultural University as subjects. Eight-seven students have been investigated for around8weeks by doing a questionnaire, vocabulary tests, writing tests and they were taught in three groups in different methods. Data were collected and analyzed by means of SPSS software with the purpose of testing the positive correlation between vocabulary acquisition and English writing. Study shows that students’ vocabulary knowledge acquisition has a positive correlation to the writing level. Those who have a large vocabulary size and good word knowledge can a little more quickly improve their English writing. The effect of vocabulary depth knowledge to productive vocabulary application is the highest, whose r-value is r=0.66, p<0.05. These students have learned how to select suitable words to express their thoughts, advanced vocabulary used more often than ordinary ones. Thus, their expression competence tended to be improved correspondingly. On the contrary, those who did not manage to master vocabulary well tangled with synonyms, collocations, polysemy and obviously they are lack of lexical acquisition strategies. As a result, their language outputs were critically affected. In addition, some suggestions are put forward for College English teaching to rectify the teachers’improper practice in neglecting vocabulary teaching or deeming it is the students’tasks to recite words and a teacher is only in charge of the text explanation. The author also proposes that teachers should help students to accomplish their English learning tasks by mastering more vocabulary acquisition strategies, especially vocabulary depth processing and writing skills, creating requirements to wholly improve the students’English foundation. The thesis is divided into five parts. Part one made a brief introduction about the research background, significance and methods. Part two summarized the former’s relevant researches. Part three introduced the research route and ways. Part four analyzed the gained relevant data. Part five drew a conclusion based on the above analysis. The gradation of all the five parts is distinct, going forward one by one and making an entirety.