The Application Of Multimedia Task-based Vocabulary Instruction To Vocational College English Classes

This thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of applying the combination of multimedia technology and task-based language teaching to vocational college English vocabulary instruction through conducting an empirical study. In order to further testify the effect of task-based vocabulary instruction, and compare the results with multimedia technology integrated, this research has made a comparison between each two of the three vocabulary teaching methods, i.e. multimedia task-based vocabulary instruction, task-based vocabulary instruction and traditional vocabulary instruction. Given the scarce research on task-based vocabulary instruction and the lack of studies that examine the effectiveness of combining multimedia technology with task-based vocabulary instruction, this study is worthy to be carried out.The subjects chosen for the current research are three intact classes of non-English major freshmen from Tianjin Electronic Information Vocational Technology College. The total number of the subjects is 103. Among them, 33 students coming from Class One form the control group who have received traditional vocabulary instruction during the whole experiment; while Class Two and Class Three which consist of 34 and 36 students respectively are treated as experimental groups who have alternatively received task-based vocabulary instruction and multimedia task-based vocabulary instruction in the two experimental sessions of the present study. The experimental data are collected from two sources: vocabulary post-tests and the questionnaire. Then, SPSS 13.0, the powerful computer software on statistics, is used to quantitatively analyze the results of vocabulary post-tests, and the data of the questionnaire are processed by percentage. Eventually, the main findings are obtained and presented as follows:1) In comparison with traditional vocabulary instruction, task-based vocabulary instruction may facilitate vocational college students'English vocabulary learning more effectively and result in significantly better performances in the retention of the productive vocabulary knowledge of newly learned words.2) Multimedia task-based vocabulary instruction may facilitate vocational college students'English vocabulary learning much more effectively and result in significantly better performances in the retention of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge of newly learned words compared to traditional vocabulary instruction.3) By and large, in comparison with the simplex use of task-based vocabulary instruction, the integration of multimedia technology may facilitate vocational college students'English vocabulary learning more effectively and result in significantly better performances in the retention of newly learned words, but only in terms of receptive vocabulary knowledge learning.4) Among the three vocabulary teaching methods, vocational college students have shown the most positive attitudes towards multimedia task-based vocabulary instruction.The above findings indicate that the combination of multimedia technology and task-based language teaching can be effectively applied to vocational college English vocabulary instruction. It injects fresh energy to traditional vocabulary instruction and compensates for the shortage of task-based vocabulary instruction. Furthermore, multimedia task-based vocabulary instruction can largely increase vocational college students'learning efficiency and stimulate their learning interest, which makes them not regard vocabulary as the most difficult part of the whole English study any more.