An Experimental Study On College English Vocabulary Acquisition Based On The Output Driven Hypothesis

Since Merrill Swain put forward the output theory in the 1980s, a great deal of researchers have conducted varieties of studies on this theory. On the basis of the output theory, in order to improve the language skills of students, Wenqiufang put forward the output driven hypothesis.On the basis of the output theory and the output driven hypothesis, this research adopted various research methods, such as literature review, experiment, interviews and so on. The main purpose of this research is to explore the effect of the output driven hypothesis-based vocabulary teaching method on college students' receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition.The researcher applied SPSS 19.0 to analyze the results of immediate post test and the delayed post test of the experimental group and the control group by Descriptive Analysis, Standard deviation analysis, ANOVA analysis and Paired sample t test.The statistics show:(1) In the immediate receptive vocabulary test, there is little difference of the scores between the experimental and the control group. And the difference is not significant. (sig=0.225>0.05); (2) In the immediate productive vocabulary test, the difference of scores of the two groups are both significant. (sig=0.001<0.05). Besides, the experimental group got higher scores; (3) In the delayed post test, whatever for the productive vocabulary or the receptive vocabulary, the experimental group got the higher grades, and all these statistics are significant. (sig=0.015<0.05,sig=0.000<0.005).The results show that the traditional vocabulary teaching method and the vocabulary teaching method based on the output driven hypothesis has almost the same influence on learners' receptive vocabulary acquisition, but the last one is more effective on promoting learners' productive vocabulary acquisition. Besides, the output-based method is also more effective in promoting learners' memory retention of the target words.This research discusses the influence of the output driven hypothesis-based vocabulary teaching method on the students' receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition. it can provide practical guidance for English vocabulary teachers and researchers who are interested in this topic.