A Study On Association Memory Strategies In High Schools

When English teaching and students' English comprehensive applying competence in our country have made great progress. We have to stress that high school students have a small size of vocabulary, which badly affects their improvement of English comprehensive competence. The study tries to discover reasons for this, and discusses the application of association memory strategies in vocabulary learning in high schools. The author believes that if we want to improve students' English comprehensive applying competence, vocabulary is the key, and that vocabulary learning is closely connected with memory. To some extent, the process of vocabulary learning is the process of memory. With the guidance of cognitive psychology and English lexicology, in this thesis, three kinds of memory have been expatiated upon. Then the relationship between memory and association has been pointed out, and the cognitive basis and rationales of association memory have been dealt with. A review of the relevant studies on association memory strategies conducted in China has also been made. Based on the review, this study has specified association memory strategies by resorting to sounds, forms and meanings of English words, hoping to highlight the actual application of association memory strategies in vocabulary learning process and to tackle students' vocabulary memorization problem. In this study, a hypothesis is proposed that association memory strategies have a significant effect on vocabulary acquisition.In order to obtain statistics needed, in the author's school, two senior three classes were sampled as experiment group and control group according to the result of pre-test. The author instructed the experiment group with association memory strategies based on words' pronunciation, form and meaning without the same instructions in the control group, conducted the post-test, and then obtained the relative statistics. The marked differences of the means between the experimental group and control group in the two tests indicate that association memory strategies have a significant effect on vocabulary acquisition, thus the hypothesis has proved me right.Based on the discussions above, the thesis comes to such a conclusion: association memory strategies based on cognitive psychology and English lexicology will enable students to memorize words effectively, enlarge their vocabulary and improve their vocabulary acquisition ability if the strategies are taught and trained properly. The author believes that the study is valuable and practical.