Effects Of Semantic Relatedness And Word Familiarity Upon Senior High School Students' English Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary plays an extremely important role in English learning.In EFL classroom context,teachers' presentation of words constitutes students' first step of vocabulary acquisition.According to cognitive psychology,people's understanding for information will vary due to different ways of presentation.Some of the presentation methods will promote people's understanding for information and others will not.It can be seen that different presentation methods influence students' vocabulary acquisition.Based on the spreading activation theory,semantic field theory and interference theory,this paper tests the effects of two presentation methods(semantically related vs.semantically unrelated presentation methods)upon English vocabulary acquisition of senior middle school students.This thesis also studies the effect of word familiarity(new words vs.words learned before but unknown now to learners)upon vocabulary acquisition.108 students from No 5 Middle School in Qinan participated in the present study.They were randomly divided into two classes(new words class and familiar words class),and each class learned two sets of words(semantically related sets,semantically unrelated sets).After the vocabulary presentation,the subjects were given a short-term memory test and a long-term memory test a week later.The contents of the two tests are consistent.After the experiments,SPSS has been adopted to analyze the data.The results show that semantic relatedness and word familiarity has no effect on vocabulary acquisition respectively.But semantically relatedness and word familiarity have an interaction effect,they commonly affect vocabulary acquisition.Semantically unrelated presentation does help participants to learn new words,and the other presentation is more effective to familiar words acquisition.Based on the above conclusions,the following implications can be drawn.Firstly,in textbook designing,semantically related words had better be presented in the context that has the same theme.Secondly,in the classroom teaching,there are two factors that should be taken into account in vocabulary presentation,namely,semantic relatedness and word familiarity.Teachers can present new words that are semantically unrelated but thematically related to learners and present familiar words that are semantically unrelated.It has gained better teaching effect.