The Picture Presents A Study On The Effectiveness Of The Direct Learning Of English Vocabulary For High School Students

Vocabulary is the basis of listening,speaking,reading and writing in English.For learners who view English as a foreign language,it is difficult to learn and use English well without a good vocabulary.Thus especially in the process of learning English as a foreign language,the acquisition of vocabulary is important,building a solid foundation for English learning.Nevertheless,for it is difficult to build a good language environment for English learners,leading to them lacking the real language environment of the input and output of vocabulary,memorizing and using vocabulary is a tough procedure.For high school students in China,learning vocabulary is an important but boring stage in the process of English learning.Due to the lack of interest and real language environment,many Chinese high school students reflect that the memory of English vocabulary is not good enough,among whom some even appear hatred to English vocabulary memorizing.Most high school students of China adopt the method of direct learning to study English vocabulary,which means they study the pronunciation,formation and meaning of English words through contents or vocabulary drills instead of such indirect ways as reading.Based on this phenomenon,this research fixes attention on whether attaching pictures to words-only contents has effectiveness in improving Chinese high school students' vocabulary memory while they learn English vocabulary directly.Due to the fact that most Chinese high school students are not allowed to use electronic devices like cellphones or tablets,at the basis of the essence of vocabulary memorizing,this research did a series of experiments to explore on the condition of using paper materials,whether adding pictures has effects in helping Chinese high school students learning English words.Under the theoretical guidance of Dual Coding Theory and Working Memory,using Chinese high school students as experiment subjects and following the three time periods of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve,this research made an experiment to explore whether high school students whose cognitive level is grown-up's can be positively influenced by applying pictures to English words memorizing.The experiment results tally with the expectation,which is that when high school students learn Englishvocabulary directly,the dual mode(texts + pictures)is more effective than the singular mode(only texts).This research also found that the mode of “texts + pictures without color” is effective in short term memory while it has no effect in long term memory,whereas the mode of “texts + colorful pictures” is effective in both short term memory and long term memory.However,such effectiveness appears in the memory of some concrete and well-comprehensive words like nouns and adjectives,with no evident advantage in verbs which are relatively hard to be performed by pictures.Additionally,it is more effective to apply pictures to memorizing words meaning than words spelling.This research has somewhat proved the effectiveness of pictures in memorizing English words when Chinese high school students learn those words directly,which mainly appears in the words that has obvious representation.This may help Chinese high school students memorize the meaning of those words and bridge the gap of each other to some extent.