A Study Of The Effect Of Vocabulary Presentation Modes On The English Vocabulary Acquisition Of The Junior High School Students

Vocabulary is important to language,just like masonry to building.Vocabulary teaching occupies an important position in English classroom teaching.As the initial and most critical stage in vocabulary teaching,vocabulary presentations have attracted much attention of researchers and scholars home and abroad,among which thematic clustering and semantic clustering are the most representative clustering presentation modes.This research taking junior high school students as the research object,focuses on the thematic clustering and semantic clustering presentation modes in teaching English vocabulary,which refines vocabulary knowledge into three dimensions: semantic association,form and meaning,and lexical collocation,thus to attempt to explore the effect of different vocabulary presentation modes on the English vocabulary acquisition of the junior high school students.As the theoretical basis,the Semantic Field Theory proposed by Jost Trier and the Schema Theory proposed by Rumelhart are applied in the research,with the combination of the relevant research results from domestic and overseas scholars,so as to explore the following two research questions:(1)What effects does thematic clustering presentation mode have on the English vocabulary acquisition of junior high school students?(2)What effects does semantic clustering presentation mode have on the English vocabulary acquisition of junior high school students?In this research,I use quantitative and qualitative research methods and conclude 90 students in three parallel classes in the eighth grade of a junior high school in Yueyang in my research experiment,which lasts 6 weeks.The thematic clustering presentation mode and the semantic clustering mode are used respectively in teaching the two experimental classes,and the vocabulary presentation mode of neither thematic nor semantic is used in teaching the control class,with the help of vocabulary test papers,questionnaires and interviews.Based on Webb's vocabulary knowledge test papers and Nation's multidimensional vocabulary knowledge framework,three sets of vocabulary knowledge test papers are designed to explore the effects of two kinds of presentation modes on the acquisition of English vocabulary in terms of semantic association,form and meaning,and lexical collocation.The date obtained from the experiment are statistically analyzed by SPSS23.0 software and interview results are discussed in the hope of answering the two research questions.The research findings are as follows: thematic clustering presentation mode has obvious advantages in the acquisition of vocabulary form and meaning knowledge,while the semantic clustering presentation mode has significant effects in the acquisition of vocabulary association and collocation knowledge.Therefore,when learners are learning new vocabulary and the teaching involves introducing vocabulary knowledge of the form and meaning,thematic clustering presentation mode should be adopted by teachers to introduce new vocabulary which can achieve the best effect;While in the stage of learners reviewing the vocabulary they have already learned,the semantic clustering presentation mode should be used,which can help students quickly associate related vocabulary and construct the correct vocabulary collocation.