An Experimental Study On The Effects Of 3 Instructional Approaches On Senior Middle School Students' L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

It can be seen from the reform of the English college entrance examination,learning English is increasingly important.The size of the English vocabulary becomes the key to the success of English.This research is on the basis of the “Attention Hypothesis”,the “Information Processing Theory” and the “Involvement Load Hypothesis”,to investigate the effect of memory of L2 vocabulary by applying the three teaching approaches provided by teacher in the process of vocabulary memory of high school students.This research adopts the Latin Square Design which can avoid the unfair intervention caused by traditional grouping.The discussions of the search are on the short-term and long-term L2 memory effect of the three kinds of teaching approaches(FonF FonFS,FonM)in high school;and on the effect of different part of speech words(nouns,verbs and adjectives)acquisition.Therefore,two research questions are explored:(1)What is the effect of the three teaching approaches(FonF,FonFS,FonM)on vocabulary learning and on different parts of speech(nouns,verbs,adjectives)?(2)What is the effect of the three teaching approaches(FonF,FonFS,FonM)on vocabulary retention and on different parts of speech(nouns,verbs,adjectives)?The subjects which are randomly divided into three groups of this study are from a natural class(N=54)chosen in an ordinary high school.Three groups of sample(whose vocabulary have no significant difference)adopt Fon F,FonFS,and FonM teaching approaches in different order.The reading material is an exposition which is chosen from a middle school textbook.The length,difficulty and theme of the text are suitable for the subjects.Before the experiment,12 target words(four nouns,verbs,four adjectives)were chosen from a thirty-word list.FonF and FonM teaching use a reading comprehension test,while FonFS adopts vocabulary exercises test.The immediate and the delayed test are adapted from the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale(Wesche& Paribakht,1997).The test results,which used to answer the research question one and two,were analyzed by SPSS 21.0 using descriptive statistics analysis and One Way ANOVA analysis.The experimental procedures are as followed:Step 1: Two weeks before the experiment,the mid-term test scores of the three experimental groups were analyzed using the descriptive statistical analysis.Step 2: In order to ensure there is no significant differences among the three experimental groups,Nation's Vocabulary Size Test was conducted.Step 3: Twelve target words(4 nouns,4 verbs and 4 adjectives)were chosen from the 30-word list one week before the experiment.Step 4: FonFS,FonF and FonM design were used in different order to learn the 12 target words.Then the immediate test was carried out.And the delayed test was implemented two weeks after.The results indicated that:(1)The three teaching approaches(FonF,Fon FS,Fon M)have positive effects on vocabulary learning.And different effects are showed in different parts of speech(nouns,verbs and adjectives).(2)The immediate test showed that,Fon FS is superior to FonF and FonM.(3)The delayed test manifested that,when learning nouns and adjectives,FonF is better than the other two approaches.While in memorizing verbs,the effects of using Fon FS are better.(4)In all,no matter what kind of teaching approaches are used,the memory effect is better when remembering nouns than the other two word classes.According to the results of the experiment,it is suggested that,different teaching approaches should be chosen based on different teaching objectives;and different teaching approaches needed in learning various word classes: memorizing verbs,FonFS is the first choice.