A Study On The Effects Of Vocabulary Presentation Methods And Meaning Concreteness On English Vocabulary Retention Of Senior Middle School Students

As we all know, vocabulary is the basic element in a language which plays a critical role in language acquisition. Wilkins once said “Without grammar very little can be said, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”(Wilkins, 1987). This research aims to explore an effective way of L2 vocabulary retention and acquisition for senior high school students. Although many studies have been conducted to investigate L2 vocabulary presentations from various angles, most of these studies have only compared different vocabulary presentation methods, but failed to take word concreteness into consideration. Based on Craik and Lockhart's(1998) Information Processing Model, the present research explores the effect of different vocabulary presentation methods and meaning concreteness on the vocabulary retention in English teaching in the senior high school, hoping to construct a more efficient and effective approach for learners to acquire vocabulary.The study adopts a 2×3 mixed design in which vocabulary presentation methods(word list presentation;semantic presentation and contextual presentation) is set as a between-subjects variable and types of word(concrete words and abstract words) as a within-subjects variable. And dependent variables include both immediate vocabulary gain and word retention. To be specifically, the author chose 90 students from two classes in Dingxi senior middle school to do the experiment and another one class(47 students) was used as the controlled class to do the pilot study, which aims to make sure the experimental materials, time and every possible situation can be dealt well in the experiment. before the experiment, participants were tested all have the same English level and vocabulary size. So in the experiment, Each participant were assigned randomly to acquire target words which are consists of 7 concrete words and 7 abstract words by using one of the presentation methods. After 35-minutes experiment, an immediate posttest was given to participants 10 minutes after the experiment to test the results of acquiring the target vocabulary, a week later, the delayed posttest was conducted to test the vocabulary retention of the participant.After collecting and analyzing the data of the two posttests by the SPSS, the results are as follows: firstly,three different presentation methods have great significant impacts upon vocabulary acquisition in delayed posttest. And more precisely, word list presentation method is performed best in the immediate posttest, but there have no different impacts upon students' vocabulary acquisition for three presentation methods. However,they have a significant difference in the delayed posttest. Contextual presentation is the best one to learn vocabulary. Secondly, concreteness of word meaning have an impact upon vocabulary acquisition. To be specifically, the recall of concrete words are superior to that of abstract words both in immediate and delayedposttest. And finally, there is a interactive effect between vocabulary presentation methods and concreteness of word meaning. To be specific, there is no interactive effect between two variables in immediate posttest. But in the delayed posttest, there is no significant difference between contextual presentation method and semantic presentation method for concrete words and have a good effect for vocabulary learning. For abstract words,there have a significant difference for each other, among which, contextual presentation method is the best one,Finally, pedagogical implications and recommendations to be inferred according to the experimental process and research results. Firstly, word list presentation method is suitable for students' learning or reviewing before taking an examination. Semantic presentation can help students broaden their vocabularies. Contextual presentation is efficient in vocabulary retention. Secondly, concrete words stands for the very specific things that can be directly perceived by people, so the recall of concrete words are better than that of abstract words, the teacher can use contextual presentation method to overcome the difficulties of mastering abstract words. In a word. In English vocabulary teaching, teachers should use the suitable presentation method to teach vocabulary according to word types and the rules of students' memory.