A Study On The Effects Of Different Vocabulary Presentation Methods On Vocabulary Learning Of Junior School Students

Vocabulary is extremely important in language learning. Junior middle school is akey period for English learning. However, problems such as single method and highrate of forgetting exist commonly among middle school students. According tocognitive psychology, the way people understanding information vary with thepresentation modes of information. Moreover, with appropriate presentation modes,acquisition of vocabulary could be facilitated. Therefore, it is practical and necessaryto explore effective presentation modes and to improve the middle school students’vocabulary retention effect.Based on the theories of cognitive psychology of memory，the theoretical depthof information processing and the elaboration theory, the present study hasinvestigated the different effect of English vocabulary acquisition of junior middleschool students by using three different presentation modes (presentation throughvocabulary list, presentation through context with the meanings of target words andpresentation through example sentences.) In this study,90students have been selectedas the subjects whom have been randomly divided into three groups, and each groupused one presentation mode. After the vocabulary presentation test, the subjects havebeen given a short-term memory test and a long-term memory test one week later. Thecontents, form and time of the two tests are all the same.After the experiments, SPSS19.0(the Statistical Package for Social Science) hasbeen adopted to analyze the data. Three kinds of statistics analyses were involved: theDescriptive Statistical, One-way ANOVA, and the Paired-Samples test.Comparing the effect of three presentation modes, we can draw a conclusion:(1)in the short-term memory test, presentation through word list is the best in vocabularylearning and retention while presentation through context is the worst, andpresentation through example sentences lay between the two.(2)In the long-termmemory test, presentation through context is the best in vocabulary and retentionwhile presentation through example sentences is the second, and presentation throughword list is the worst.(3)There is a significant difference between short-term and long-term memory test in each presentation mode, while the memory fading speed ofthe three presentation modes as different: the memory fading speed of presentationthrough vocabulary list is the fastest, while the memory fading speed of presentationthrough context is the slowest, and the memory fading speed of presentation throughexample sentences lay between the two.Therefore, we can have some enlightenments: in English teaching, there were nouniversal presentation mode, the teacher should choose appropriate vocabularypresentation mode according to the specific group of students and teaching objectives,and no matter which presentation mode is used, students should review timely toconsolidate their memory of the words.