A Comparative Study On Effects Of Retelling And Rewriting Tasks On IVA Of Receptive And Productive Knowledge

Vocabulary learning is considered as one of the foundations for language learning,as all of the language skills are based on a sufficient amount of vocabulary.However,a majority of Chinese non-English majors consider vocabulary learning as a challenging job due to the failure to use proper learning strategies,which has aroused the interest of many English teachers and researchers.Therefore,an increasing number of studies have been conducted,aimed at exploring how to learn vocabulary in a more efficient way.In recent years,there are many literatures and empirical studies that have emerged to confirm the effectiveness of output on incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA).Most of them focused on comparison between output with input,between different types of written output tasks or between interactive oral output and individual written output in order to find the learning condition under which learners can acquire vocabulary more efficiently.However,differences between individual oral and written output tasks are yet to be explored.In addition,there are some studies that deal with the acquisition of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge,but few of them focus on the effect of output on the acquisition of the two levels of vocabulary knowledge.On the basis of theories related to vocabulary acquisition,this dissertation intends to investigate the effects of individual oral and written output tasks on non-English majors' incidental vocabulary acquisition.There are five questions to be solved for the research: 1)Will individual retelling and individual rewriting tasks based on reading facilitate the incidental acquisition and retention of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge of form-meaning link and associations? 2)Which type of individual output task is more effective on the incidental acquisition and retention of the above-mentioned aspects of vocabularyknowledge? 3)Will receptive vocabulary knowledge be acquired earlier than productive vocabulary knowledge? In terms of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge,will form-meaning link be acquired earlier than associations? 4)Will receptive vocabulary knowledge be retained longer than productive vocabulary knowledge? In terms of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge,will form-meaning link be retained longer than associations?5)Will forgetting occur one week after the incidental acquisition of target words? Which type of output task is more effective on vocabulary retention?Aimed at answering the above questions,the research was carried out in Zhixing College of Hubei University.40 of the students from two classes participated in the research.All of the participants were first required to read a passage,with all the possible new words(including the target words)glossed within the passage.Based on reading,the above two types of output tasks were assigned to the two classes.The first class were required to retell what they had read,while the second class were assigned a composition task on what they had read.Both tasks were supposed to be completed individually without any communication with other classmates.To ensure positive output,the retelling class were required to hand in the audio recording of their output while the rewriting class were required to hand in their composition.Vocabulary knowledge on form-meaning link and associations was measured both receptively and productively in immediate and delayed post-tests.SPSS statistical software was adopted for analysis on the results.The comparison and analysis on the results suggests that individual output tasks do facilitate IVA and retention.Generally speaking,no significant difference is found between the two output groups in acquisition and retention of almost all aspects of vocabulary knowledge except for productive knowledge of form-meaning link in immediate post-test,with the results in favour of individual retelling group.Comparison between gains in different levels and aspects of vocabulary knowledge demonstrates that learners perform significantly better in receptive vocabulary knowledge than in productive vocabulary knowledge,and that students achieve significantly greater gains in form-meaning link than in associations.Moreover,comparative results between immediate and delayed post-tests suggest that forgetting occurred substantially in delayed post-test one week later(P<.01),and that the forgetting rate of individual written output group(P>.001)shows less significance than that ofindividual oral output group(P<.001)in productive vocabulary knowledge of form-meaning link and associations.That might be attributed to deeper level of processing and more chances for rehearsal of the target words stored in working memory in rewriting than in retelling,which are conducive to vocabulary retention.Therefore,in the future English teaching,teachers should design more output tasks for learners and try to diversify output tasks according to different teaching objectives so that learners can both acquire and retain vocabulary efficiently.