A Correlation Study Between The Application Of Association Strategies And The Effects On Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High School

Vocabulary,as one of the three elements of a language,is of great importance in language acquisition.Given its arbitrariness,the English vocabulary poses a great difficulty for students in acquiring words pronunciation,form and meaning,leading to lexical memory problem.New English Curriculum in senior high schools has higher requirements for students in learning vocabulary.In addition,the recent new reform policy of the college entrance examination on English subject has laid stress on the practical using of English vocabulary acquisition.Association strategies,based on the Schema Theory and information processing theory,have been proved,by many experts at home and abroad,effective on students' vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,in this paper,the author makes an empirical study on the application of association strategies in vocabulary learning process in high school students.116 senior grade-two students from Henan province were invited to be subjects.This paper aims to analyze high school students' application of association strategies in vocabulary learning process and to find out the relationship between application of association strategies and the effects on vocabulary acquisition(breadth and depth)in senior high school students,which helps the author to seek more effective methods for teachers and students in developing English vocabulary,providing some empirical data.After the data collection and analyses,the author draws some conclusions as following.Firstly,students' application of association strategies reaches the medium level.The priority sequence of students' using association strategies is morpheme-association strategy,phonetics-association strategy,collocation-association strategy and semantics-association strategy.Secondly,there are significant differences on the use of association strategies between the students of high-score and the low-score of the effects of vocabulary acquisition,especially in morpheme-association strategy and collocation-association strategy.Hence,students in high-score use association strategies more frequently than the ones in low-score,especially students in high-score use morpheme-association strategy and collocation-association strategy obviously more than those in low-score.Thirdly,there is a positive correlation between application of association strategies and the effects on vocabulary acquisition.To some extent,the more students use association strategies,the better effects they will achieve in vocabulary acquisition.The improvement on the effect of vocabulary acquisition in breadth is significantly greater than on the effect of vocabulary acquisition in depth.In other words,the use of association strategies helps students to enlarge their vocabulary and improve the effect of their vocabulary acquisition in breadth.In the end,some practical and meaningful suggestions are put forward from the perspective of teachers and students so as to help improve vocabulary teaching and learning.