An Experimental Study Of Effects Of Word Clustering On Senior High School English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary learning is of great significance in English learning.Word clustering is a kind of strategy that word can be related and grouped in various ways.There is linguistically based clustering,such as lexical sets and synonyms,and cognitively based clustering,such as thematic clustering(Papathanasiou,2009).Ying Zhenjian(2006)divided word clustering into thematic clustering,semantic clustering and non-word clustering.There has been a lot of researches on word clustering,but there is no consistent conclusion on which kind of clustering is more effective.In addition,most domestic scholars take college students as the research subjects,and a few scholars study the influence of word clustering on high school students.Therefore,this study takes high school students as the research subjects to study the influence of different types of word clustering on high school students' English vocabulary learning.On the basis of semantic field theory,distinctiveness hypothesis,and interference effect,this study researches the influence of thematic clustering,semantic clustering and non-word clustering to the English vocabulary initial learning and long-term retention.Then this study analyzes the influence of three types of word clustering for different levels of students in order to find a suitable way for high school students vocabulary learning and to provide efficient ways of vocabulary teaching for high school English teachers.The author selected 62 students from the same class in the Grade one of Cheng'an NO.1 high school in Handan,Hebei province as the subjects.All the 62 students were in the experimental group without the control group.In this paper,three groups of six artificial words were selected.Both the artificial words and the experiment time were tested with a pilot study,which confirmed that the experiment could be carried out normally.The experiment was divided into immediate-post test and delayed-post test.The purpose was to study the effects of different ways of word clustering upon initial vocabulary learning and long-term memory retention.The delayed-post test was conducted one week after theimmediate-post test.The data obtained from the two experiments were analyzed by SPSS19.0.This study comes to the following conclusions:(1)The three ways of word clustering all have advantages and disadvantages.(2)Thematic clustering is more suitable in the phase of initial learning of vocabulary,and semantic clustering is more suitable for long-term memory and retention of vocabulary.(3)Non-word clustering is more suitable for students with poor English scores.(4)For almost students,non-word clustering is worse than thematic clustering,and better than semantic clustering in the phase of initial vocabulary learning.But for long-term memory and retention,non-word clustering is the worst among the three types of word clustering.The study draws the following implications for vocabulary teaching:(1)Teachers should flexibly choose the vocabulary presentation method according to the specific teaching situation.When presenting new vocabulary,they should try to avoid semantic clustering with similar meaning but could choose thematic clustering which has relevant but different meanings.(2)Semantic clustering is more suitable for long-term memory and retention because it has a high retention rate of vocabulary.(3)For students with poor grades,non-word clustering with no correlation in meaning is more suitable for them.