Effects Of Different Vocabulary Presentation Modes On Junior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Acquisition

In human society,normal language communication between individuals cannot be done without vocabulary.Linguists at home and abroad have carried out large amounts of research on vocabulary.Vocabulary teaching plays an important and fundamental role in the field of foreign language teaching,and many scholars have focused on vocabulary presentation,which is the starting point of vocabulary teaching.In the elementary education stage in China,many teachers prefer some traditional modes of vocabulary presentation,particularly the Word-list Presentation Mode,while students are often troubled by small vocabulary,low memory efficiency,lack of interest,etc.Therefore,it is quite important to find some effective vocabulary presentation modes to improve vocabulary teaching and acquisition.In order to find out the effects of different vocabulary presentation modes on junior high school students’ English vocabulary acquisition,the researcher carries out a teaching experiment in a secondary school in Suzhou.This study is based on the memory theory and the information processing theory,and mainly focuses on the following two questions:1)Under the two different vocabulary presentation modes,are there any significant differences in terms of junior high school students’ English vocabulary acquisition?If so,what are these significant differences?2)Under the two different vocabulary presentation modes,are there any significant differences among the students of higher or lower English proficiency level in terms of their vocabulary acquisition?If so,what are these significant differences?The experiment is conducted in two parallel classes in Grade Eight with two different modes respectively,namely the Image Presentation Mode and the Contextual Presentation Mode.An immediate post-test and a delayed post-test are done to provide feedback after teaching.SPSS 24.0 software is used to get relevant results by processing and analyzing all the data from the experiment.The results of the study show that 1)Under the two different vocabulary presentation modes,there are no significant differences in terms of junior high school students’vocabulary acquisition.2)Under the two different vocabulary presentation modes,there are no significant differences in terms of vocabulary acquisition among learners of higher or lower English proficiency level.3)Students’ short-term acquisition effects are much better than their long-term acquisition effects,regardless of their English proficiency levels.Besides,memory-fading will inevitably occur for both learners of higher and lower English proficiency levels,and the speed of memory-fading is faster under the image presentation mode.In light of the results concluded,the researcher draws the following implications:1)While teaching vocabulary,junior high school teachers don’t have to be constrained to a particular type of vocabulary presentation mode.They can choose any vocabulary presentation mode they prefer and feel most comfortable with,and the mode should be conducive to helping students acquire vocabulary at the same time.2)After presenting the vocabulary,teachers can help students consolidate the vocabulary they have learned with different exercises and activities,so as to help students deepen the memory and finally improve their vocabulary acquisition.