The Effects Of Sentence Making On L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is one of the indispensable components in L2 acquisition field. In China, with the development of society, college graduates with a good command of English are urgently needed. Therefore, more and more importance has been attached to college English teaching and learning. Many researchers have done plenty of studies on vocabulary learning strategies. However, these researches mainly investigate what strategies are used by English learners. Although some of them focus on the correlation between one specific vocabulary learning strategy and English proficiency, few researches explore the influence of sentence making on learners’ vocabulary acquisition. Thus there is large room for us to investigate the functions of sentence making. Based on the Input Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis, the current study aims to explore the correlation between sentence making and vocabulary acquisition among private college students from the perspective of receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge, hoping to help L2 learners improve their vocabulary learning efficiency and provide empirical evidences for the future research.This paper first introduces the research background, analyzes the current problems of vocabulary acquisition among college students. Secondly, it provides the theoretical background of the thesis and reviews previous studies about sentence making at home and abroad. Then, it presents the subjects, research questions, instruments, procedure, and data analysis of the current investigation. Finally it concludes the thesis with a summary of the major findings, implications of the findings, the limitations of the current study and suggestions for the future research.The experiment was carried at Xi’an International University. The subjects were freshmen from two accounting major classes. One of the two classes was randomly chosen as the experiment class and the other as control class. The theories involved in this study are Input Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis. The research questions are listed as follows:(1) Are sentence making positive or negative to non-English majors’ second language vocabulary acquisition?(2) How does sentence making affect students’ acquisition of second language vocabulary?(3) What are students’ attitudes toward applying writing sentences in the process of vocabulary acquisition? The study finds that the treatment class outperforms the control class both in terms of receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge for the target words acquisition; the treatment class gains a better knowledge for target words than that of non-target words; the difference between the two classes for the non-target words acquisition is not significant. From the interview, it can be seen that most students show positive attitudes towards sentence making. Thus we can draw the following conclusions:(1) Sentence making can produce positive effects on non-English majors’ second language vocabulary acquisition.(2) Sentence making affects students’ acquisition of second language vocabulary in terms of receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge.(3) Most students appear to be positive to the effectiveness of sentence making in the process of second language vocabulary acquisition but few of them choose to use it when it is left to their own. Thus it is suggested that teachers should pay more attention to the use of sentence making in class to help students improve the efficiency of vocabulary acquisition.