The Effects Of Free Recall Strategy On Vocabulary Acquisition In Chinese EFL Classes

In EFL teaching,researchers have been looking for effective strategies to promote students' efficiency of vocabulary acquisition.Recently,there is much research supporting the idea that active retrieval could promote long term retention of information.It is argued that in-class retrieval practice could be perceived as formative assessment strategy in that it provides effective feedback so as to help teachers adjust teaching and promote students' learning.Among varied retrieval practice,free recall is reported with competitive advantages in promoting retention of information.However,in domestic junior high English teaching,free recall seems rarely used and the effects of it are yet to be explored.Therefore,with reference to formative assessment,the researcher has been following2 junior high EFL classes in Shijiazhuang for one semester,in which 16 vocabulary teaching classes with free recall tasks were interspersed in one of the two classes.Students involved in the study include 58 students from the class with free recall tasks(experimental class)and 58 students from the class with traditional teaching(contrast class without intervening).The study compares their vocabulary acquisition improvement in three months so as to explore the effects of free recall teaching in junior high school classroom.This study attempts to address 3 questions:(1)Is free recall an effective strategy to promote students' vocabulary acquisition in Chinese Junior students' EFL teaching?(2)What are the teacher's attitude and feedback about free recall teaching?(3)What are thestudents' attitudes and feedback about free recall in their learning?Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to address these research questions in the current thesis.Except for classroom observation,116 junior high students are involved in a pre-test in the beginning of the semester and a post-test after three-month teaching.One same test paper is used in the pre-and post-tests.The contents include recall writing,reading comprehension and vocabulary test(multiple choice items and choice items of five from eight).Follow-up questionnaire survey and interview are administered to learn the teacher's and students' attitudes and feedback about free recall teaching.The survey respondents of questionnaire are the 58 students in experiment class.The interviewees are the teacher,who implemented free recall teaching,and 10 students from the experiment class.In addition,SPSS 22 is used to analyze the results of pre-and post-tests as well as the reliability and validity of questionnaire data.The results show that(1)free recall is an effective strategy to help students acquire vocabulary.(2)free recall can provide effective feedback to teacher and students as one formative assessment strategy.(3)free recall teaching needs reasonable time controlling.Through analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data,this study finally puts forward four suggestions on implementing vocabulary teaching:(1)teacher should create varied opportunities to help students make assessment;(2)make recall contents and assessment criteria clear in self and peer assessments;(3)retrieval is important in vocabulary teaching and learning;(4)In teaching,portfolio building is recommended to help students record and assess what they have learned with a purpose of facilitating learning instead of discriminating students.