An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Spreading Activation Model On English Productive Lexical Variety Among High School Students’ English Writing

With the development of international communication and globalization, undoubtedly, English is becoming more and more important as an instrument of communication. While, we have encountered a quantity of problems in English teaching. Special attention is focused on the issues concerning the way of improving productive lexical richness in writing.The author introduces Spreading Activation Model(SAM) in order to improve student’s productive lexical richness in writing. Spreading Activation model is an ideal lexical organization form contributing to its advantages in deep processing of words. Compared with traditional teaching method, it helps students to improve productive vocabulary richness in writing. Under Spreading Activation Model, concepts are organized according to semantic relation and semantic similarities. Thus, under the model, the semantic relation between words can be further explored. A semantic network can be constructed in terms of the semantic similarities to aid the students to store and memorize words. At the same time, when a word can’t be produced, the students can recall some related ones and infer the target one in order to produce words more efficiently.Experiment, questionnaire and interview are the methods for this research, and this paper aims to research the influence of spreading activation model on productive lexical richness in senior high school student’s English composition. Based on the cognitive psychology, input and output theory and the theory of depth of processing on vocabulary, in this experimental study, 129 grade two students of senior high can be selected as subjects. The thesis aims at helping students to build up the semantic network of lexicon, enriching productive vocabulary, and cultivating divergent thinking.The research questions are:(1) At present, How is the current situation of vocabulary learning of students in Senior High School Urumqi?(2) Can the spreading activation model help students to improve the productive vocabulary richness in writing ?The research comes to the conclusions as follow: after ten month of teaching, the tokens of composition in both group are lengthened. But, the average of tokens in experimental group is 124, while in control group, students produce 87 tokens on average. Besides, First and second 1000 words in experimental group grow more rapidly than those in control group.According to the result of statistics, among 4 components of lexical richness, Spreading Activation Model has no significant effect on the improvement of lexical sophistication, but in terms of lexical variation, lexical destiny, and average word length, SAM does have great influence upon them.This paper includes five chapter. Chapter one mainly describes the research background, goals and significance. Literature review including definition of important terms, theoretical foundation and related researches in home and aboard are demonstrated in Chapter two. Chapter three aims to illustrate research questions, aims, tools, and methods. In chapter four data analysis and outcome are discussed. Last chapter makes conclusion about implication and demerits of this research.