An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Cognitive Approaches To Vocabulary And Writing Ability

This thesis is an empirical study of the relationship between thecognitive approach and the writing ability by applying the memory theoryof the information-processing model to the learning of English of thestudents in vocational colleges, hoping to help students memorizevocabulary better and then make progress in writing ability.It is commonly recognized that the acquisition of vocabulary is ofcrucial importance, and it is closely related to the five language skills, i.e.listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Without wordssentences cannot be made. However, it is strange that many students cando very well in listening and reading, but when it comes to writing andspeaking, many of them are incompetent. Therefore, it is necessary to findan effective way of vocabulary teaching, which can further influencelearners’ writing. As a field of psycholinguistics, theinformation-processing theory investigates how learners get informationand then store it into memory and at last take information out of memory. When it comes to the cognitive approach, two commonly recognizedcognitive approaches are provided, namely, Chinese cognitive approachand English cognitive approach, but which one can help the learnersmemorize more words and further improve the learners’ writing ability?This thesis answers the question and comes to the conclusion that Englishcognitive approach is more effective in improving learners’ writing ability.With the results of the experiment, some pedagogical implicationsare proposed. Teachers should consciously adopt the principles of thememory theory to help learners know what to memorize and how tomemorize. They should use different techniques to train and improvelearners’ memory ability.