A Study On The Effectiveness Of The Phrase-Approach To Business English Vocabulary Learning

The vocabulary size is one criterion for measuring one's English competence. How to learn vocabulary effectively has long been an important research subject for foreign and domestic scholars. Some researches in China have focused on the point-approach such as learning vocabulary through classification or root formulation. The point-approach does play a part in vocabulary learning, but it does not seem very effective, especially for those Business English learners.This study conducts a research on the phrase-approach to Business English vocabulary learning. Taking the characteristics of Business English into consideration, the author proposes that learning vocabulary through phrases is effective and efficient, arguing for the effectiveness of the phrase-approach from the perspective of the semantic field theory. The thesis endeavors to prove the effectiveness of the phrase-approach through a comparative experiment.Chapter One introduces the working hypothesis of the study, i.e. the phrase-approach is an effective way of developing Business English learners' vocabulary. An introduction to the purpose of the research, the terminology and the organization of the thesis follows.Chapter Two reviews the origin and development of the semantic field theory with a concentration on the syntagmatic semantic field. This chapter also briefly reviews the relevant studies on the phrase-approach both in vocabulary learning and vocabulary teaching. It provides theoretical support for the study.Chapter Three presents the reason why the phrase-approach is recommended in Business English learning and the design of the experiment. Chapter Four processes and analyzes the collected data, and the experimental results turn out to justify the hypothesis. This chapter further discusses the effectiveness of the phrase-approach from the perspectives of neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and contextulism and the advantages of this approach are concluded. In order to investigate students' attitudes toward the phrase-approach, Chapter Four also discusses an additional questionnaire conducted as part of the study. Finally, the author puts forward some practical suggestions on Business English vocabulary learning and teaching based on the quantitative studies and the questionnaire results.Chapter Five concludes the thesis, including a summary of the whole thesis, possible significance of the study, and the limitations of the research, as well as suggested further research possibilities.