The Effect Of Context And Learning Mode On Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention

In the field of Second Language Acquisition, implicit learning and explicit leaninghave been studied separately for a long time since Reber referred to the concept of implicitleaning in1967. At first stages, researchers tried to make a clear distinction betweenimplicit and explicit learning. For a long time, they were treated as two different learningmodes. However, recent studies claimed that it’s not scientific to divide learning mode intotwo independent elements. The fact is that they are closely related and often interact witheach other (Mathews,1989) in first language acquisition. Therefore, the two learningmodes should also be concerned in second language acquisition.In the acquisition of vocabulary, studies exploring the interaction between implicit andexplicit learning are limited. Vocabulary has long been the focus of language learning andmost studies center on the comparison between implicit and explicit learning throughmanipulating teaching material and methods. Based on the previous studies, four learningmodes are designed in this study: implicit+implicit learning, explicit+explicit learning,implicit+explicit learning, explicit+implicit learning. So the primary purpose of thisstudy was to explore the effectiveness of four learning modes on Chinese English majors’vocabulary learning and acquisition.In addition, based on Web (2007)’s study, the context is also taken into considerationby dividing sentence context into two levels:(a) the more informative context, whichincludes strong clues for the participants to infer meaning from the sentence;(b) the lessinformative context, which is consistent with the whole sentence but no obvious clue forinferring meaning. Therefore, another purpose of this study is to find out whether the levelsof context affect the vocabulary acquisition.An experiment was conducted to test the effect of learning modes and context onacquisition and retention of vocabulary. Participants consisted of80(among them, one wasexcluded) sophomores of English major (with an average of21) from Shanxi MedicalUniversity. The subjects came from4different classes of English Department and wereassigned randomly to four groups according to the above four learning modes. Subjectswere required to have self-paced learning. Learning materials under each learning modewere the same. They were consisted of target words, definitions of target words andexample sentences, which were encoded and presented on the screen through E-prime.There is two blocks under each leaning mode, so the target word would be learned twice with two different sentences in a random way. Example sentences for50%of the targetswords were designed with the more informative contexts and the rest of the sentences wereedited with the less informative contexts. The learning stage lasted30-40minutes and thetesting period lasted20minutes. Form recognition and meaning recall tests wereconducted after learning stage. The immediate post test, and delayed post tests (after oneweek) were administered to assess participants’ acquisition and retention of vocabulary.The data were collected and analyzed by SPSS17.0.Results showed that (1) there existed no significance among four leaning modes onthe acquisition and retention of words.(2) No significance was found between two levelsof context. Context has no main effect on acquisition and retention of words.(3)Interaction was found between context and learning mode on the retention of words.Implicit+explicit learning mode was more effective than other learning modes when theparticipants learned words in the more informative context. To learn words in the lessinformative context, under the mode explicit+implicit learning, participants performed thebest among four groups. On the other hand, under implicit+implicit learning mode, themore informative context was more effective than the less informative context.The present study is an empirical research exploring the effect of explicit and implicitlearning modes and context on Chinese EFL English majors’ vocabulary acquisition andretention. From the perspective of learning mode, this study is a further study of implicitand explicit learning and takes the interaction between them into consideration. As far asthe context is concerned, the context is divided into the more informative and the lessinformative levels. Thus, the study enlightened by these factors brings some theoretical andpedagogical significance.