A Study On The Effectiveness Of Concept-Mapping Strategy On English Vocabulary Acquisition

Serving as a fundamental constituent of a foreign language,vocabulary learning,and its teaching have been one of the academic priorities in previous studies.Language teachers have been attempting to apply different strategies to improve vocabulary learning performance.However,Chinese EFL learners still have difficulty in effective vocabulary acquisition,permanent vocabulary retention,and flexible vocabulary use.Consequently,the present study is intended to investigate whether constructing concept maps on a mapping software based on the concept-mapping theory can improve vocabulary learning performance among 49 Chinese EFL learners.To answer the three research questions,60 CET-6 words in total from 18 paper tests ranging from 2016 to 2018 were selected carefully.Preliminary proficiency tests on vocabulary acquisition,retention,and use without using any learning strategy were taken first.Vocabulary post-tests were taken right after a seven-week concept maps construction experiment.The paired-samples tests revealed that the exploitation of concept-mapping strategy played a positive part in improving Chinese EFL learners' vocabulary learning performance both in detaining the memory decay rate and in using acquired words,such as vocabulary collocations and part of speech in sentence contexts.Moreover,the interview responses also indicated Chinese EFL learners' optimistic attitude towards applying concept-mapping strategy in their vocabulary learning process.The investigation confirmed quantitatively and qualitatively that with learner-constructed concept maps on a mapping drawing tool,Chinese EFL learners could show better performance and yield a better result in acquiring targeted words,in retaining acquired words for a longer period of time,and in deepening their word comprehension via concept associations.Such a finding should offer some available vocabulary learning techniques to Chinese EFL learners,and provide helpful suggestions for following language teaching,and for further research on vocabulary learning or other vocabulary learning strategies.