| Primary school is a critical period for the rapid growth of children’s vocabulary knowledge.Providing context to help children learn vocabulary is one of the most common learning methods at this stage.Restudy and retrieval practice have been proved to be effective vocabulary learning strategies when children are out of context,and the effect of retrieval practice has been demonstrated better than restudy.However,as researchers increasingly suggest providing a rich context for primary school students to learn vocabulary,it has become an important and practical issue that which learning strategy is more effective in the rich context.At present,there is no research to explore the influence of the two learning strategies on vocabulary memory effect in a rich context.The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of various richness of context on the effect of vocabulary learning when children use different learning strategies.The study selected 151 primary school students of Grade 3 to participate in the experiments.The experimental procedures were designed based on previous studies.Participants were allowed to use different learning strategies to learn vocabulary in different contextual richness(single context,multi context).They were required to finish vocabulary test immediately and one week later after learning.The learning effects of subjects were compared among different learning strategies and different contexts richness.The first study used a 2×2 mixed design(2 contexts: single/multi context,and 2learning strategies: restudy/retrieval practice).We found that there was a significant difference in the recall accuracy rate when using repeated learning and extraction exercise strategies in the single context.But in the multi context,there was no significant difference on the learning effects between the two learning strategies.The results indicate that the effect of context is greater than the effect of learning strategy in the multi context.The second study used a between-subjects design to re-discuss the differences in the vocabulary learning effects among children in different contexts when using different learning strategies.The between-subjects design avoided the impact on the learning results and test results when the subjects used the two learning strategies alternately.We found that in the cued recall test and the fill-in-the-blank test,the learning effects of the two learning strategies were significantly different in the single context condition,while there was no significant difference in the multi context condition.Both of the first and the second studies show that the richness of context has a certain moderating effect when primary school students of Grade 3 use different strategies to learn vocabulary.The results of this study indicate that the richness of context is an important variable that affects vocabulary learning and moderates the effectiveness of vocabulary learning strategies.When learning vocabulary in the single context,retrieval practice should be used to obtain better memory retention effects;while in the multi context,both learning strategies can achieve better memory effects.In conclusion,this study provides significant guidance to primary school students on vocabulary learning. |
