A Research Of The Correlationship Between E-dictionary And English Vocabulary Acquisition Of Non-English Majors

Vocabulary is the material of language construction and the carrier of informationexpression. Especially in the process of second language acquisition, the vocabulary levels willhave a direct impact on the second language learners’ ability of listening, speaking, reading,writing and translating. The vocabulary teaching in class is a key point in the process of Englishteaching, but it is not the only way for students to acquire it. Some researches have shown thatlearners’ after-class self-study, including reading English materials, listening to English programsor watching English videos, etc., can achieve a better effect on vocabulary mastery.The researches on English vocabulary acquisitions are rich at home and abroad, so are thedictionary using strategies. However, most of them focused on the influence of dictionary usingstrategies on English vocabulary acquisition; moreover, the dictionaries involved almost refer tothe paper-dictionaries rather than e-dictionaries, the using strategies of which are touched lightly.This paper, based on the former researches, will try to find out whether there exists thecorrelation between using e-dictionaries and English vocabulary acquisition.With Craik&Lockhart’s Depth-of-Processing Hypothesis, and the theory of attentionunderlying the theoretical framework, this paper take I.S.P. Nation’s vocabulary level test andthe questionnaires exclusively designed for non-English majors as referential materials to answerthe following questions:(1) Whether there exists a correlation between the use of e-dictionariesand the English vocabulary acquisition.(2) If the correlation does exist, what is it? Will usinge-dictionaries facilitate or hinder learners’ English vocabulary acquisition?(3) Whether suchcorrelation is affected by the L2learners’ different vocabulary levels.The subjects involved in the research are divided into two groups: one is experimentalgroup and the other is control group. In order to have a general idea about the subjects’e-dictionary using strategies in looking up English vocabulary, their receptive vocabulary leveland productive vocabulary level, both groups take part in the same questionnaire and vocabularylevel test prior to the experiment, from which the most effective e-dictionary using strategiesgenerally acknowledged by the subjects are summarized and then applied to the experimentalgroup for vocabulary acquisition in the following two months, while the control group still usethe e-dictionaries with the same strategies as usual. Two months later, the two groups are testedby the same vocabulary level test to observe whether the subjects’ receptive and productivevocabulary level changed noticeably or not. To explore their correlation, the present study, takingdifferent e-dictionary using strategies as independent variables and the data of vocabulary testsas dependent variables, analyzes the whole statistic figures of pre-experiment andpost-experiment with the analysis method of Spearman correlation coefficients and SPSS statistic software to obtain the correlation coefficients between different e-dictionary usingstrategies and receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition, and then followed by aprominence analysis of each group of data. The test and T-test are also taken in order to testdifferences of e-dictionary using strategies between high score group and low score group in thereceptive and productive vocabulary level test.The statistical results show:(1) e-dictionary using strategies such as pronunciation,collocation, selective attention under context and selective note-taking according to thecorresponding examples of word items is helpful for learners’ English vocabulary acquisition;(2)the correlation degree differs between different e-dictionary using strategies and receptive andproductive vocabulary acquisition. For example, contextualization has prominent correlationwith receptive vocabulary acquisition while note-taking has prominent correlation withproductive vocabulary acquisition. Selective attention has prominent correlation with bothreceptive and productive vocabulary acquisition;(3) the development of receptive vocabularyacquisition and productive vocabulary acquisition is imbalanced;(4) subjects with largerreceptive vocabulary prefer to adopt contextualization, selective attention and E-C dictionarystrategies when using e-dictionaries while subjects with larger productive vocabulary tend tochoose collocation, note-taking and E-E dictionary strategies and the correlation is prominent.This dissertation is composed of six parts. The first part explains the significance and thepurpose of the study; the second part deals with the literature review; the third part introduces thetheoretical framework of vocabulary acquisition; the fourth part describes the research design;the fifth part analyses the data of questionnaire and tests, and the final part points out thelimitations of the present study and suggestions for the future study.