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A Study Of The Influence Of Continuation Task On Senior High School Students' Second Language Vocabulary Learning

Posted on:2019-05-29Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y HuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2405330545463720Subject:Education
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Vocabulary is the essence of language,and a learner needs a large number of words to acquire language.Reading plus tasks has been verified as an effective way to facilitate L2 vocabulary learning,but which tasks are more effective for students,what factors or principles construct an effective task in promoting L2 learning are under heated discussion.Continuation task is a writing method that has received attention in recent years.It realizes the combination of content creativity and language imitation.It is regarded as one of the most effective foreign language learning methods.The present study introduces continuation task into English vocabulary teaching in senior high school.By investigating and comparing continuation task and summary task's effectiveness on L2 lexical learning,the present study aims to find whether continuation task can promote senior high school students' L2 vocabulary learning and explore the influential factors that promote senior high school students' L2 vocabulary learning by continuation task.An empirical study was conducted.A total of 60 freshmen of senior high school were extracted from three natural parallel classes of Huang Zhou 1th Senior High School participated in this study and they were randomly assigned as three groups: a continuation group,a summary group,and a control group.Every participant was required to fulfill a different writing task(reading plus continuation task,reading plus summary task,picture-only task writing)with assigned words involved during the given time.There were 10 assigned words,consisting of 6 target words and 4 distractors.To ensure all the target words were new to the participants and the reading material was their only access to these words,6 target words were chosen from the material and they were substituted by pseudo-words.The part of speech and explanations in English of the target words are glossed behind the text with other unfamiliar words in the reading material.After the writing tasks,all participants unexpectedly received the vocabulary tests(including a fill-in test and a vocabulary knowledge scale test),testing the form,meaning and usage of 6 target words and 4 distractors,to measure their lexical acquisition through the task.A week later,through the delayed vocabulary tests with the same testing contents only changing questions' sequences,the present study hopes to find out the effects of the tasks on word retention.The vocabulary test scores were studied with the statistics.One-way ANOVA,the following post hoc Scheffe and paired t-tests have analyzed the score of the form,meaning,and usage tests of two post-tests.They found that all the three groups acquired the word knowledge to some extent in terms of form,meaning,usage.The continuation group gained significantly higher score than the control group in the meaning and usage tests while the summary group did not perform as well as the control group in the meaning and usage tests.There was significant difference between the continuation group and the summary group in vocabulary learning.The continuation task has better effectiveness than summary task in promoting L2 vocabulary learning.The above results suggest that,although learners can acquire L2 vocabulary through reading-and-writing tasks,not all reading-and-writing tasks share the same effectiveness.The interaction between reading and writing and the writing contents creation are regarded as the key principles for promoting vocabulary learning,and the continuation task is perfect combination of them.
Keywords/Search Tags:continuation task, L2 vocabulary learning, senior high school students, summary task, reading-and-writing task, content creation
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