A Comparative Study Of Different Writing Tasks On The Middle School Students' Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

English Curriculum Standard explicitly emphasizes that middle school students are required to learn to use vocabulary.However,there is a gap between the current situation of vocabulary learning and the new standard of curriculum.Therefore,the present study aims at exploring how two different writing tasks would affect middle school students' second language vocabulary acquisition.In this paper,retelling is the way that students are asked to express in their own words according to question cues,while free writing is to finish a composition based on the brain storming.And these two different ways of writing are to help students with their receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition by the use of target words.The present experiment was designed to answer the following research questions.Q1.Is there significant difference between free writing and retelling in students' second language vocabulary acquisition? Q2.Which writing tasks would promote students' productive vocabulary acquisition,free writing or retelling? Q3.In the above two writing tasks,what are the differences among high score group,medium group and low score group? Making sure the research questions,the author took three parallel classes of Grade 8 from a school in Fuzhou as research objects.Students of Class(1)practiced retelling task,and students of Class(2)carried on free writing task,while students of Class(6)took the pilot test.The experiment consisted of 4 phases,i.e.one pilot test,one pretest,the treatment and two posttests.First of all,the participants were asked to take a pretest to make sure that they were on the equivalent level of vocabulary acquisition before the experiment.In addition,students of Class(6),who were not included in the treatment,participated in the pilot test to make sure that the target words are new words they had never met before.Finally,after finishing the two different writing tasks,students of Class(1)and Class(2)are asked to take the receptive and productive posttest in order to compare the different effects of free writing and retelling on their vocabulary acquisition.Posttest data and analysis results reveal the following research findings.There is a significant difference between free writing and retelling in students' vocabulary acquisition.And retelling task promotes greater productive vocabulary acquisition,especially for the students whose writing competence are in the medium group.As for the students whose writing proficiency are in the high score group,free writing can promote greater productive vocabulary acquisition.It is shown that the degrees of difficulties in writing tasks influence the vocabulary learning.For free writing task,the more difficult one,the high score group performs better.According to the noticing triggering function,students can enhance their memory of the target words while performing the retelling task under the hint of the target words and the content framework.However,while performing free writing task students put more emphasis on the writing content,language organization and expression,which leads to their weaker memory retention compared with the retelling task.The achievement of the research findings can not only support the relative studies but also extend the research objects and theoretical application.Finally,it is suggested that teachers are expected to properly apply some writing tasks to the improvement of students' lexical acquisition.