A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Writing Output And Reconstruction Output On High School Students' English Productive Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is regarded as an essential component of second language acquisition.It is believed that vocabulary learning always develops from receptive vocabulary knowledge to productive vocabulary knowledge.Numerous empirical studies have found that L2 learners' productive vocabulary knowledge always lags behind their receptive vocabulary knowledge because productive vocabulary acquisition is much more complicated than receptive vocabulary acquisition.In recent years,a large number of empirical researches have testified the positive role of output in incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention,but most of them compared written output with oral output,or compared cooperative output with individual output to examine which task can promote L2 vocabulary acquisition and retention.However,few studies probed into the effects of writing output and reconstruction output(two different written output tasks)on productive vocabulary acquisition.Therefore,based on the Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Hypothesis as well as Swain's Output Hypothesis,the present study attempts to explore quantitative evidences for the different effects of writing output and reconstruction output on high school students' incidental productive vocabulary acquisition and retention.The present study is aimed at answering two questions: 1)What are the effects of writing output and reconstruction output on high school students' incidental acquisition of productive vocabulary? 2)What are the effects of writing output and reconstruction output on high school students' written vocabulary in terms of quantity and accuracy of retrieved words?94 students in Grade two from a high school in Guangdong Province were selected as the participants.The English proficiency test was conducted to prove that 94 participants from two classes have equivalent English proficiency.Participants were asked to read a passage with nine target words printed at the bottom of the reading material,which were listed with their pronunciation,word class and Chinese meaning.After that,the reading materials were taken back.The participants of Class 1 performed writing output task and participants of Class 2 performed reconstruction output task.After finishing the output tasks,they took the productive vocabulary test.And the productive vocabulary retention test was conducted one week after the treatment.The participants were not informed before both tests.The quantitative data of these two tests were analyzed by independent samples t-test to make comparison between the effects of writing output and reconstruction output on productive vocabulary acquisition.The compositions of two output tasks were analyzed to answer research question two.The results indicate that both output tasks facilitate high school students' acquisition of productive vocabulary knowledge.Meanwhile,the reconstruction output group has a better performance than the writing output group in productive vocabulary acquisition as well as retention.In addition,the reconstruction output group can retrieve more words than the writing output group.While both writing and reconstruction output group attain high accuracy of retrieved words.The research findings confirm the positive effects of different written output tasks on high school students' productive vocabulary knowledge.Therefore,it is necessary that English teachers should properly provide some written tasks for students,especially the reconstruction output task.In the meantime,students themselves are supposed to conduct the written output tasks outside the classroom.Since writing output also promote the acquisition,students can keep a diary trying to use the new words they just learned.As reconstruction output is better than writing output,it is suggested that students should try to use the new words to retell the passage,which can be from textbook or original English books for young adults.