A Study Of Applying Spreading Activation Model To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

As one of three elements of language, vocabulary is an existing pillar of language system. As famous linguist D. A. Wilkins(1972) said, “Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. As we can see, vocabulary plays a critically important role in language and language learning.Semantic network was put forward by American psychologist Quillian in 1969.One model of it is Spreading Activation Model(SAM). This model assumes that words are represented in a network, and the organization is like a web of interconnecting nodes, the concepts are stored as interconnected links. Applying this model to vocabulary teaching and learning can not only show dynamic and networked development of vocabulary, but also can effectively enlarge vocabulary and improve students’ interest in vocabulary learning. This research aims to explore the authentic effects of applying this model to vocabulary teaching and the change of their interests in vocabulary learning.The subjects were 108 students of Grade One in Fu Gu Senior High School from two parallel classes. One class is Experimental Group(EG) instructed under the application of SAM to vocabulary teaching, the other is Controlled Group(CG)instructed under the traditional vocabulary teaching method. Tests, questionnaires and interview were utilized as research instruments. The collected data was analyzed by the software SPSS13.0. The research findings show that it is effective to apply SAM to vocabulary teaching to enlarge students’ vocabulary, besides, this method improvesstudents’ vocabulary learning interests. Some pedagogical implications are proposed in the end.