The Effects Of Semantic Clustering& Thematic Clustering On Multi-dimensional Vocabulary Knowledge Acquisition Of Senior Middle School Students

If there was no grammar,people couldn't express a lot of things;without vocabulary,people could not express anything"Wilkins(1972:48).This thesis aims to explore more effective presentation modes to facilitate multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition for senior middle school students.Although there were many researches that were conducted to explore the effect of L2 vocabulary acquisition through different presentation methods of single word,few studies focus on the association among vocabularies.At the same time,many studies paid little attention to senior middle students while most of participants were undergraduates when adopting semantic clustering and thematic clustering.What's more,almost all the previous researches focused on word meaning acquisition when evaluating the vocabulary achievement,while ignoring the other dimensions of vocabulary knowledge.Therefore,this thesis chose semantic clustering and thematic clustering the two vocabulary presentation modes to explore the effect of different presentation modes on multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition for senior middle school students.Through multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge tests based on Nation's multidimensional vocabulary knowledge framework,this thesis explores the effects of modes of presentation on the acquisition of target words' vocabulary knowledge 90 senior middle school students in terms of grammatical function,syntagmatic association,paradigmatic association and meaning & form.Semantic Clustering and thematic clustering were the independent variables and the score of test is the dependent variable.Before formal experiment,Class 9 was chosen to join in pilot study to ensure the validity of target words and to make sure participants know all the words except target words in the post-test papers.90 senior students were from Nan Ba Middle School(Class 7&Class 8,Grade Two)in Si Chuan province and they were randomly divided into experimental groups and control group.The experiment was conducted in 75 minutes,including 35-minute word presentation and 40-minute answering time.One week later,delayed post-test was conducted.Based on this experiment: this thesis proposed three questions: 1)Can both semantic clustering &thematic clustering promote the target words' multi-dimensional vocabulary knowledge acquisition for the senior middle school students? 2)In which dimensions of vocabulary knowledge acquisition is semantic clustering better than thematic clustering for senior middle school students? 3)In which dimensions of vocabulary knowledge acquisition is thematic clustering better than semantic clustering for senior middleschool students? In order to answer these three questions,this thesis conducted one vocabulary size test and two post-tests.At the same time,this thesis designed multi-dimension test papers.In the immediate post-test,semantic clustering and thematic clustering are both helpful to vocabulary acquisition.But thematic clustering is the most useful presentation mode.In the dimensions of grammatical function and syntagmatic association,they are both useful.But in the dimensions of paradigmatic association and meaning & form,thematic clustering is the best mode.The delayed post-test results showed that the learners achieved significantly higher scores under the learning condition of semantic clustering on the grammatical function,syntagmatic association and paradigmatic association tests.Apart from those,the learners also got promising scores with respect to meaning and form under the learning condition of thematic clustering.Therefore,the study proves that vocabulary learning tasks determine what modes of word presentation to employ.