The Effects Of Dictogloss On Senior School Students’ L2Oral Productive Vocabulary

The importance of vocabulary in SLA is evident. Nation (1990) dividesvocabulary into receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. Although there area sea of researches on vocabulary at home and abroad, there is still enough room forthe research of oral productive vocabulary and the reasons are as follows: Firstly, thecomplexity of measurement and the high demands of hardware and software lead tothe result that most researches are about the written forms of vocabulary instead oforal vocabulary. Additionally, there isn’t any research adopting a specific teachingtechnique in vocabulary instruction; Moreover, in view of the difficulty of oralproduction for the high school students, senior school students are rarely chosen asthe subjects. Thus, in order to make up for those defects, the present paper venturesto study the effects of Dictogloss on senior school students’ L2oral productivevocabulary from the perspective of second language acquisition, cognitive linguisticsand psycholinguistics. The author attempts to tackle with the following two researchquestions:1) In what aspects does Dictogloss influence the middle school students’L2oral productive vocabulary?2) What’s the developmental trend of their oralproductive vocabulary after using Dictogloss?To pursue these aims, a conceptual theoretical framework is constructed byintegrating the common features of Dictogloss and oral productive vocabulary andcombining the theories of Swain’s (1995,1998) Comprehensible Output Hypothesis,Levelt’s (1989) Speech Production Model and Anderson’s (1990) Adaptive Controlof Thought Model. There are altogether four stages of this model: the cognitive stage,the reflexive stage, the associative stage and the automatic stage. The procedures ofwarm-up and dictation in Dictogloss correspond to the first stage, reconstructing tothe second stage, self-correction and analysis to the third stage. Speech is finallyproduced automatically after the function of noticing, hypothesis testing andmeta-language. 36subjects from a first-rated provincial key high school were chosen anddivided into the experimental group (EG) and controlled group (CG). The study haslasted for21weeks and explores into the effects of Dictogloss on senior schoolstudents’ L2oral productive vocabulary by covering four perspectives of lexicalbreadth, lexical depth, oral fluency and communicative strategies. Through the oraltest, the transcriptions of audio texts and the comparison of the output indexes areanalyzed. In the end, this paper has the following major findings:1) Under the treatment of Dictogloss, the lexical breadth has increasedsignificantly. However, there was an uneven development of each index that subjectshave improved to some extent in the aspects of word type, word woken, lexicaldiversity and lexical density, but without significant difference. In LFP, subjectsmade the biggest progress in the1stand3rd1000word level. The advanced levelstudents benefit the most in the3rd1000word level, while the intermediate level andpre-intermediate level ones have an overall change in the1st1000word level.Accordingly, the L2leaner’s development in lexical level is nonlinear.2) Middle school L2learners have made significant progress inspelling/pronunciation with regard to lexical depth. Although the EG’s achievementsin plurality, articles and copula are undeniable when compared with CG’sperformance, their progress didn’t reach the critical value.3) The scores in oral fluency are the most satisfactory that3indexes (SR, AR,MLR) manifest significantly different and the index of PTR is quite near the criticalvalue.4) The questionnaire of communicative strategies indicates that students in EGprefer achievement strategy and reduction strategy after being treated withDictogloss, while those in CG prefer the L1-based strategy. Generally speaking, theirattitudes towards the communicative strategies are almost the same, but theapplication amount is not as what’s been expected.To sum up, the effects exerted by Dictogloss on senior school students’ L2oral productive vocabulary are multi-dimensional. Its benefits are inevitable on the whole.But out of the limited time of the empirical study, its positive roles haven’t beenmanifested completely, which in another word is that students’ increasing progresswas not significant in some specific aspects. Based on the research findings,adequate attention should be attached to Dictogloss and the balance betweenreception and production could not be neglected.