The Effects Of Contrastive Analysis And Translation On English Majors’ Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

In order to change the present situation of "deaf and dumb" English, improve the students’ communicative competence in English teaching, many teachers will focus on the language sense and pay less attention to language form. Although this method can improve students’ language fluency, in terms of accuracy improvement, it is not an ideal. It easily leads to inter-language fossilization. Form-focused instruction can improve students’ language fluency and accuracy, which are crucial for the learners of English to improve the communicative competence. The term "form-focused instruction"(FFI) refers to any planed or intended to enable language learners to notice linguistic forms with guidance activities. So FFI includes both the traditional teaching method which based on the structural syllabus and the method based on communicative activities, guiding students’attention to linguistic form. The term "form" is intended to include phonological, lexical, grammatical, and pragmaliguistic aspects of language. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of contrastive analysis and translation activities on the incidental acquisition of single words and collocations. We contrast three groups of fresh men of English department. The mother tongue of the students is Chinese and they are in the same English proficiency. Each group represented one instructional condition:meaning focused instruction (MFI), non-contrastive form-focused instruction (FFI), and contrastive analysis and translation (CAT). The target items consist of10English words and7English phrases. FFI group of students accept text-oriented task, this task requires students to pay attention to the target items; MFI group of students accept meaning-centered task, this task does not require students to pay attention to the target items; CAT group students accept the task of text-based translation:from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English. The teacher will provide the target items and possible options of Chinese translation during the process of correction step. The three groups of students with the same task time. After the task, there will be a test for the three groups of students on the positive and negative memories of the target items respectively. One week later, the three groups of students receive the same test again. The scores of CAT groups of students are apparently higher in the two tests than that of other two groups of students. These superior results are discussed in light of the ’noticing’ hypothesis,’pushed output’,’task-induced involvement load’, and the influence that L1exerts on the acquisition of L2vocabulary.