A Study On The Effectiveness Of Lexical Teaching Based On Form And Meaning

Lexical acquisition is one of the most important issues in second language acquisition. It provides essential basis for the construction and understanding of sentences and paragraphs, and successful lexical acquisition contributes greatly to the second language acquisition.This thesis aims to find out and provide a promising way for the learners to learn lexicons, which bases on lexical acquisition theory, the Noticing Hypot hesis, the Depth-processing and Long’s division of two optional instructions, namely Focus on Form and Focus on Meaning. Form and Meaning are two important aspects of lexicons, and they affect lexical acquisition in subtle ways. This thesis aims to find out that either Form- focused teaching or Meaning- focused teaching contributes more to lexical acquisition and retention. The thesis mainly solves the following two research questions:1. Which can better facilitate English Majors’ acquisition of lexicons, form or meaning?2. Which can better enable English Majors to improve long-term memory, form or meaning?An experiment is carried out to find the solutions of the two questions. The experiment selects 87 English Major Students and is executed in ordinary English reading classes. The Form Group and the Meaning Group received an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test after the experiment finished. The major findings ar as follows:The result of the experiment manifests both form- focused lexical teaching and meaning- focused lexical teaching contribute to the lexical acquisition. But the Form Group(FG) outperformed the Meaning Group(MG) in the immediate post-test and delayed post-test because form- focused lexical teaching enables the learners not only focus on the meaning of the passage, but on the form of the target words. Different tasks demand the two groups to do different kinds of exercises and more attention and mental processing is required from the Form Group. This guarantees better effects of both lexical acquisition and retention of the Form Group. In conclusion, a form- focused lexical teaching is more effective than meaning- focused lexical teaching in the acquisition and retention of the lexical items.