An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Text-word Teaching Sequence On Junior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Retention

Vocabulary is an essential part in language acquisition.Vocabulary development is closely related to reading comprehension.In junior high schools in China,it’s common to teach vocabulary in intensive reading classes.Some teachers teach new words before leading students to read texts,whereas others instruct their students to read texts first and learn some new words afterwards.Few researches or investigations have been conducted on these two teaching sequences.This study,based on an experiment of junior high school students in Grade 9 of a middle school in Guangzhou,aims to find out the effect of text-word teaching sequence on vocabulary retention.The present study,with Optimal Input Theory,Context Theory and Involvement Load Hypothesis as its bases,attempts to testify two research hypotheses:(1)textword teaching sequence helps junior high school students remember the new words in the English text better in comparison with word-text teaching sequence.(2)text-word teaching sequence helps junior high school students acquire productive knowledge of the new words in the English text better in comparison with word-text teaching sequence.In the experiment,the author carried out a 10-week instruction for 80 students from two homogeneous classes which were randomized into experimental group and control group.A post-test was used as the instrument to assess the vocabulary retention and productive vocabulary knowledge separately.Independent sample t-test with SPSS 18.0 was adopted to analyze the data.The results show that experimental class outperformed control class in both vocabulary retention and productive vocabulary knowledge acquisition significantly.The study indicates that text-word teaching sequence can promote junior high school students’ vocabulary learning.The present study sheds light on EFL teaching and learning.First,teachers should encourage students to learn words through reading instead of learning words in an isolated way.Second,it is helpful for students to infer unfamiliar words while reading.Third,Tasks with higher involvement load and more productive activities are beneficial for students.Fourth,teachers should have an awareness to create contextual conditions for students to learn new words.