A Study On The Influence Of Concreteness Effect And Task Difference In L2Vocabulary Acquisition

Past decades have seen a dramatic increase in works on the area of L2vocabulary acquisition. Previous studies indicate that a lot of factors may influencethe second language vocabulary acquisition.Laufer (1990) pointed out that the word itself would have an influence on theease and difficulty of the word learning. One subject of these is word Concreteness,which means that words expressing concrete concepts are processed more quickly andcorrectly than words expressing abstract concepts.The effect of task difference on second language vocabulary acquisition has alsobeen widely studied for decades. Two commonly used types: receptive and productivetasks, have been frequently compared to reveal their benefits on L2vocabularylearning. Nevertheless, current knowledge as well as the empirical evidence do notallow for definitive answers to which is a better way for L2vocabulary acquisition. Inthis study, we use sentence reading and sentence writing to explore this problem.Thus the present study investigated the interactive effects of word Concretenessand task difference for L2vocabulary learning with Chinese university students.There are immediate post-test and delayed post-test.The immediate post-test results indicated that sentence writing can lead to highervocabulary gains and retention relative to sentence reading if enough time is allocatedfor each task. Moreover, recall is better for concrete words than for abstract words bythe subjects. As for the delayed post-test, the impact of task difference does notchange one week later and the difference of the superiority of sentence writing oversentence reading is always significant. As for the impact of word concreteness, if wediscuss it in both sentence reading and sentence writing task generally, wen canconclude that it does not change one week later. However, if we discuss it in sentencereading and sentence writing task separately, we will find out that the superiority ofconcrete words over abstract words changes in sentence reading task but does notchange in sentence writing task since it wanes in sentence reading task but still significant in sentence writing task.