The Effects Of The Different Glossing Conditions On Senior High School Students' English Vocabulary Acquisition

As one of the most basic components of language,vocabulary is of great importance.In recent years,researchers have carried out a large number of studies to explore effective ways to promote vocabulary learning.And gloss has been proved to be one of the most effective ways.At present,most of the existing studies mainly focus on the effects of glossing language,glossing position and multimedia gloss on incidental vocabulary acquisition,and the positive effects of L1 marginal gloss on vocabulary learning have been confirmed.However,little attention has been paid to how different glossing conditions affect vocabulary acquisition,such as giving glosses or checking glosses for the target words by looking up dictionary by students themselves.Therefore,the present study seeks to probe into the effects of gloss giving,gloss checking and gloss receiving on vocabulary acquisition and retention of senior high school students.Based on the Input Hypothesis,the Noticing Hypothesis and the Involvement Load Hypothesis,this study takes senior high school sophomores in Changsha,Hunan Province as the research objects and mainly addresses the following three questions: 1)What are the effects of gloss giving,gloss checking and gloss receiving on the immediate learning of the target vocabulary items? 2)What are the effects of gloss giving,gloss checking and gloss receiving on the long-term learning of the target vocabulary items? 3)What are the effects of gloss giving,gloss checking and gloss receiving on students' vocabulary learning interest?In this study,120 sophomores in a senior high school were divided into four groups: pilot group,L1-gloss giving group(GG),L1-gloss L1-checking group(CG)and L1-gloss receiving group(RG).The result of Vocabulary Size Test showed that the vocabulary size level of four groups were basically the same.After discussing with the experienced teachers in the senior high school,the module 8 Unit 4 language practice(D3)of Advanced with English(Yilin Version)was chosen as the reading material,and the target words were selected by 30 students in the pilot experiment.In the formal experiment,three groups of students completed reading according to different requirements and received immediate posttest,including receptive vocabulary test and productive vocabulary test.After one week,the delayed vocabulary posttest was taken.According to the collected data,Excel,SPSS and other tools were used to analyze the influence of these three different glossing conditions on students' receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition and retention.In addition,semi-structured interview was used to explore students' interest towards different glossing conditions.In this study,the results of research questions are as follows: 1)In terms of immediate vocabulary learning,the results of receptive vocabulary test and productive vocabulary test are similar.Giving and checking groups outperform receiving group and there are no significant differences between giving and checking groups.2)In terms of long-term vocabulary learning,the performance of giving group and checking group is also better than that of receiving group in receptive vocabulary retention.However,as to the productive vocabulary retention,giving group is better than checking group,and receiving group is the worst.3)Learners generally think that giving gloss by themselves is good for vocabulary learning and they prefer this glossing condition.This study explores the effects of these three different glossing conditions on senior high school students' vocabulary acquisition,which can not only provide suggestions for English teachers in vocabulary teaching,but also provide practical guidance for senior high school students to effectively learn vocabulary.However,there are also some limitations,such as small sample size and short experimental period.