Effects Of Different English Vocabulary Presentation Modes On Vocabulary Depth Of Senior High School Students

English as a foreign language in China has grown to be significant in all walks of life.To learn English well,one has to learn vocabulary which is the fundamental factor of language learning and teaching.Vocabulary learning,however,is not as simple as most people have been assuming.To learn a word,one needs to know not only its pronunciation,spelling and literal meaning but also its connotation,collocation,synonym,antonym,etc.,which constitute complete word knowledge.In Chinese senior high schools,most English teachers explain the Chinese definitions of words and expressions but ignore their English definitions,the result of which is that students do remember a great quantity of words and expressions but cannot use them correctly in specific context.In other words,this way of vocabulary presentation could indeed improve students' vocabulary breadth but is not conducive to their knowledge of vocabulary depth,which is far from enough to meet the requirements of the new English curriculum standard for senior high schools(2013)and the college entrance examination.Given such situation,how to present English vocabulary becomes even more critical.For these reasons,this thesis aims to explore an effective English vocabulary presentation mode that can improve students' vocabulary depth in terms of word association and synonym discrimination.In the present research,109 senior high school students at the same English level in Wuwei No.1 middle school participated in the experiment.They were divided into the control group and the experimental group.The experiment was comprise of a pretest,the vocabulary teaching,two posttests and an interview.After the pretest,two groups of students were treated with two different vocabulary presentation modes respectively.In the control group,new words and expressions were presented to students in class from five aspects: pronunciation,spelling,Chinese definition,part of speech and synonym,while in the experimental group from seven aspects: pronunciation,spelling,Chinese definition,English definition,part of speech,synonym as well as example sentence.After the experiment that lasted for eight weeks,both groups took the Word Association Test(WAT)designed by Read and the vocabulary test of synonym discrimination.All the data were processed and analyzed by SPSS 17.0.In the end,an interview as a supplement was conducted in the experimental group to obtain more information about students' opinions on different English vocabulary presentation modes.The results suggested that,under the same situation,presenting bilingual explanations together with example sentences worked better than Chinese definitions alone to improve students' vocabulary depth in terms of word association and synonym discrimination.In the interview,all the participants thought positively of the former vocabulary presentation mode,namely presenting the bilingual definitions and example sentences of vocabulary.Implications of the present research were also discussed.For example,teachers should speak English as much as possible in class;students should be encouraged to use English-English dictionaries;meanings of vocabulary should be explained in simple words,and so on and so forth.The present study is not without its limitations.First,the experiment duration is too short;second,the WAT has its own defects;third,making impromptu example sentences is difficult for novice teachers.These limitations were put forward so that future researches could be more complete and perfect.