A Comparative Study Of The Explicit And Implicit Teaching On Vocabulary Retention For Junior Middle School Students

Vocabulary plays a fundamental and paramount role in English which makes vocabulary teaching being recognized as an indispensable part embodied in teaching listening, speaking, reading and writing.In China, vocabulary teaching serves as a critical and difficult issue in junior middle schools English teaching. However, as a matter of fact, there still lacks of an effective and well-recognized way to teach vocabulary. The present study purposes to aim at raising several questions about the nature of vocabulary knowledge, especially the difference results of explicit vocabulary teaching method and implicit vocabulary teaching method, as well as the different effects of instruction on vocabulary retention. On the other hand, the research is also expected to help teacher realize how to select and apply the more suitable way to the vocabulary instruction and encourage an appropriate balance between explicit and implicit teaching of vocabulary in second language classroom so as to improve students’efficiency in the vocabulary retention.Based on the theory of depth of information processing by Craik and Lockhart (1972), which argues that the deeper the processing, the more durable the memory of the item processed, this paper attempts to study the effects of the implicit and explicit teaching on vocabulary retention. This study attempts explore the following questions:(1) Do explicit instruction and implicit instruction have different teaching effects on junior middle school students’vocabulary retention?(2)Are they both in the receptive vocabulary knowledge and the productive vocabulary knowledge, or either of them?(3) Between explicit instruction and implicit instruction, which one is more effective in short-term memory and long-term memory? The participants involved in the present study consisted of two intact classes of junior middle school students, totally83people. One class was designed as the explicit group (n=40) and the other as the implicit group (n=43). During the16weeks experiment, both groups had six English classes per week. The only difference was that the explicit group was taught by explicit vocabulary instruction, whereas the implicit group was taught by implicit vocabulary instruction. A pre-test, four immediate tests and four delayed tests were administered, and results of the explicit group were compared with those of the control group. The statistic results of their scores calculated by SPSS16.0and the quantitative analysis indicates that:(1) Explicit instruction and implicit instruction have different teaching effects on junior middle school students’vocabulary retention.(2) The explicit vocabulary teaching enables students to acquire more words than the implicit teaching in both vocabulary receptive and productive knowledge. It has a good effect on short-term memory.(3) In long-term teaching effect, implicit vocabulary teaching method can facilitate more in learners’ receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.In conclusion, these findings have shown that the explicit vocabulary teaching method can bring higher efficiency to junior middle school students in their receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge in short time retention. However, the two instructions perform similarly in the long term. Based on the above findings, English teachers should introduce the cognitive perspective into vocabulary instruction and consciously combine the implicit and explicit vocabulary modes in the English vocabulary teaching.