The Correlation Among Vocabulary Presentation Ways,Cognitive Load And Vocabulary Retention Of Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is extremely important in language learning.In the process of English learning,high school students need to master plenty of English words.To a certain extent,one's big vocabulary can reflect a high level of language proficiency.And developing the students' ability of memorizing English words and enlarging students' vocabulary are the important tasks of English teachers.However,problems such as single vocabulary teaching method and high rate of forgetting exist commonly among senior high school English teaching and learning.Therefore,vocabulary teaching has been a hot topic in academia and many researchers have focused on vocabulary teaching theory or vocabulary teaching strategies and all these studies have important practical significance.However,in literature reviewing,the author finds that lots of previous related studies are on the characteristics of words or teaching methodology.Although they have obtained certain achievements,few scholars explore what methods of vocabulary teaching effect is best on the basis of cognitive load theory.Therefore,this study,on the basis of cognitive load theory,intends to explore what kind of vocabulary presentation ways can best reduce the learners' cognitive load and then achieve the optimal effect of vocabulary memory so that the students can memorize words in an easier way.More than 100 students from a senior high school in Fuzhou took part in this experiment.Based on the cognitive load theory,this study aims to explore the following three questions:1)Is there any difference between high-level vocabulary retention group and low-level vocabulary retention group in cognitive load?2)Is vocabulary retention related to cognitive load?3)Is there a difference on vocabulary retention and cognitive load in immediate or delayed vocabulary retention with different vocabulary presentation ways?All the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 19.0 and the main findings are as follows.1)There is a difference between high-level vocabulary retention group and low-level vocabulary retention score group in cognitive load.And the high-level vocabulary retention group has a lower level of cognitive load.2)There is a significant negative correlation between cognitive load and vocabulary retention.3)In the immediate vocabulary retention test,presentation through word list is the best way in vocabulary retention and the cognitive load is in the lowest level while presentation through context is the worst and the cognitive load is in the highest level.Presentation through example sentences lay between the two.In the delayed vocabulary retention test,presentation through context did the best and the cognitive load is in the lowest level while presentation through word list is the worst way in vocabulary retention and the cognitive load is in the highest level.Presentation through example sentences also lay between the two.And there also exist significant differences at 0.05 level in scores between the presentation through word list and context.The present research gives some suggestions to English teachers on how to use cognitive load theory to design vocabulary teaching ways.