An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Different Vocabulary Presentation Modes On Vocabulary Retention Of Senior High School Students

Compared with Senior English Syllabus,the Senior English Curriculum Standard put forward higher requirements in the terms ofvocabulary.However,in the actual teaching process,many English teachers are not satisfied with the effect of vocabulary teaching,and most English learners have a problem of small vocabulary.Since 1980 s,the study of second language vocabulary acquisition gradually become the hot topic.Most domestic studies focus on the concrete method,principle and strategy of vocabulary teaching,or linguistic theory and vocabulary teaching,or culture and vocabulary teaching,corpus and vocabulary teaching and so on.There are few studies about vocabulary presentation mode,especially empirical studies which takes senior high school students as research subjects.This study chooses 144 senior students of three similar classes in a senior school of Zhangzhou as the subjects.The three classes are taught with three relatively practical and operablevocabulary presentation modes,glossary presentation modes,illustrative presentation modes and context presentation modes.After the target words have been presented,the subjects are tested immediately as well as a week later.The content,time and form of two tests are identical.SPSS 21.0is used to analyze the data and four kinds of statistics analyses have been adopted: the Descriptive Statistical,One-way ANOVA,Multiple Comparisons and T-test.The study attempts to answer the following four questions:(1)Do the three different vocabulary presentation modes have different effects on vocabulary retention?(2)Which presentation mode is more conducive to short-term memory?(3)Which presentation mode is more conducive to long-term memory?(4)Do the three different vocabulary presentation modes have different effects on the forgetting trend of vocabulary retention?The study gets four findings:(1)Different vocabulary presentation modes have different effects on vocabulary retention.(2)The result of immediate test shows that the glossary presentation mode is more conducive to short-term memory,the effect of illustrative sentence presentation mode takes second place and the the effect of context presentation modes is the worst.(3)The result of delayedtest shows,the context presentation mode is more conducive to long-term memory,the effect of illustrative sentence presentation mode takes second place and the the effect of glossary presentation modes is the worst.(4)Different vocabulary presentation modes have different effects on the forgetting trend of vocabulary retention.Although the forgetting trends of three presentation modes are in decline,the speed of forgetting are different,the speeds of forgetting of glossary presentation mode is the fastest and the context is the slowest.Based on thefindings,the theory of depths of processing and the elaboration theory,three suggestions for senior high school vocabulary teaching and study are put forward.