An Empirical Study Of Effects Of Word Clustering On Students’ L2 Vocabulary Acquisition At Junior Middle School

Vocabulary is of great importance in learning and teaching languages since it is one of the fundamental elements of any languages. In second language vocabulary acquisition, many studies have been conducted to investigate the efficient methods of how to present vocabulary to facilitate learning. Word clustering is one of the main modes to present new words. There have been lots of researches on effects of word clustering, but no consensus has been achieved. Besides, most of the studies focus on semantic clustering and thematic clustering. Few studies have probed into phonological clustering and compared the difference of effects within different types of word clustering.The current study explored middle school students’ learning performances and outcomes in order to find out the effects of word clustering on students’ second language vocabulary acquisition. The research was aimed to answer the following three questions:(1) Do any correlations exist between word clustering and students’ L2 vocabulary acquisition in immediate-post test?(2) What are the effects of word clustering on students’ long-term memory in L2 vocabulary acquisition?(3) Which type of word presentation do most students prefer? What are the major factors which influence their preferences?74 students from Hangzhou No. 10 Middle School participated in the research. They were asked to take immediate-post test after learning four groups of words which were presented in four different methods(semantic clustering, thematic clustering, phonological clustering and non-word clustering). One week later, participants were required to take a delayed-post test. A questionnaire was also designed to investigate learners’ attitudes towards word clustering. Data was collected and then analyzed by SPSS(Version 16.0). On the basis of the data results, the following conclusions can be achieved:First of all, effects of teaching and outcomes of learning are closely related with the methods of presentation. Different presenting methods have different impacts on word learning. Non-word clustering produces significantly better outcomes than word clustering in both immediate and delayed-post test.In the second place, different methods of word presentation have different effects on rates of word retention. Among the four types, non-word clustering method keeps the highest word retention rate, followed by phonological clustering and semantic clustering. The lowest rate of word retention occurred in the thematic clustering group.Thirdly, students’ attitudes vary greatly towards different word presentation methods. The major factors that influence students’ preferences can be concluded as their individual differences such as interest and word class of the words selected in the present research.