A Study Of Effects Of Sentence Making On Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary plays an important role in foreign language learning. As early as1972, Wilkins said that very little can be delivered without grammar and nothing can be conveyed with no vocabulary. Recently researchers have paid much more attention to vocabulary acquisition, giving rise to many studies concerning how to improve students’ learning of vocabulary. The strategy of making sentence has been favored by many researchers as well. However, few studies have been done in terms of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge acquisition and no study explored students’attitudes toward the use of sentence making has been available. The present study is to investigate the effects of sentence making on English vocabulary acquisition on the basis of the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and the theory of Depths of Processing via an experiment as well as to explore learners’attitude toward its usage in the process of vocabulary acquisition aiming to improve the efficiency of students’acquisition and teachers’teaching of second language vocabulary.The experiment was conducted at Beijing International Studies University. The subjects were freshmen from two Chinese major classes. One of the two classes was randomly chosen as the experiment class (treatment class) and the other control class. Both of the two classes had to take the integrated English course and were to learn the same required vocabulary of four units. The author of the present study randomly selected out10target words of each unit with40in all for four units. The remaining required words of each unit were referred as non-target words. In the treatment class, the teacher taught vocabulary by asking students to make sentences with the target words in addition to the traditional vocabulary teaching methods such as offering explanation, translation, analysis of the context and so on. After one unit was finished, the students were required to make new sentences with the target words different from those made during the class and hand in their work for the teacher to check. However, in the control class, all the required words were taught in the traditional way with no sentence making used. When the students finished learning all the four units, they were assigned to take a receptive vocabulary knowledge test and a productive vocabulary knowledge test. The tested words included both target words and non-target words and data were collected respectively. The test results were analyzed via SPSS17.0. After the tests,10students randomly chosen from the treatment class were interviewed to investigate their attitudes toward sentence making in second vocabulary acquisition.The conclusions drawn from the experiment are as follows:1) the treatment class outperformed the control class both in terms of receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge for the target words acquisition;2) the treatment class had gained a better knowledge for target words than that of non-target words;3) the difference between the two classes for the non-target words acquisition is not significant. This study revealed that sentence making could produce positive effects on second language vocabulary acquisition. In addition, the interview showed that students appeared to be positive to the effectiveness of sentence making in the process of second language vocabulary acquisition but few of them chose to use it when it was left to their own. Thus the teacher is supposed to pay more attention to the use of sentence making in class to help students improve the efficiency of vocabulary acquisition.