An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Implicit Vocabulary Instruction For Non-english Major Undergraduates In College English Class

As vocabulary plays a fundamental and important role in English teaching,many researchers have not ceased to explore the vocabulary teaching methods,which is mainly embodied in explicit and implicit vocabulary teaching.In China,the research on vocabulary teaching is mostly conducted in junior schools and occasionally in universities,while the method focuses on explicit vocabulary teaching or the integration of implicit and explicit vocabulary teaching.With the development of information,the overall college student' English level is on the rise.How to teach them to learn vocabulary autonomously is a serious issue.This research devotes the feasible investigation on the implicit vocabulary instruction through quasi-experimental study combined with the input hypothesis and depth of information processing on the basis of current situation of the non-English majors in order to offer reference for the vocabulary teaching and learning.116 non-English major undergraduates from Food Science and Engineering major with 58 students as the experimental class,and from Electrification Engineering and Atomization within 58 students as the controlled class participate in the study within a term to testify the effectiveness of implicit vocabulary instruction.All the subjects take the immediate and delayed tests which include the reception part and production part.After the scores are analyzed by SPSS and the students selected randomly are interviewed,we can get the following findings:1.The mean score is higher in the experimental class than the controlled class between the receptive part and productive part and there is a great difference between the implicit vocabulary instruction and explicit vocabulary instruction.As the study continues,the score in the experimental class is increasing steadily especially up to 90% in the production part of the delayed test.The result proves the depth of information processing proposed by Craik and Lockhart(1972)that “the deeper the processing,the more durable the memory of the item processed”.2.The interview result shows that students with high-level English competence are more willing to accept the implicit vocabulary instruction.This instruction could effectively promote students' autonomous learning ability and language practical ability,and enhance their confidence and initiative of English learning.The students with middle-level English competence would like to study and practice English vocabulary with the help of the implicit vocabulary instruction.However,when encountering the more complicated words spelling and multi-meaning words,they get used to looking up the Chinese meaning and giving up the inferring English meaning through the context.The students with low-level English competence are inclined to recite the words directly due to their less word storage and weak language capacity.The study thus concludes that the implicit vocabulary instruction is an effective vocabulary method which could help students to remember new words stably and enduringly,especially to enhance the enthusiasm and self-confidence for senior English learners to learn vocabulary.Furthermore,it can provide theoretical and practical significance for the vocabulary instruction study in the future.