Effects Of Chinese And English Definitions On The Accuracy Of English Vocabulary Use In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary plays an important part in language learning and studies on how to teach vocabulary become popular in second language acquisition. In this paper, I mainly discuss the effects of Chinese and English definitions on the accuracy of vocabulary use in senior high schools. At present, most students in senior high schools mainly rely on Chinese definitions or Chinese translations to learn new words, rendering the learning process awfully tedious and learning results inefficient and dissatisfying. As a result, it is necessary to explore a new method of vocabulary teaching mode. What’s more, a literature review also reveals that the participants in the previous studies were mainly confined to college students or Chinese students in foreign countries. Hence, few studies focus on learning English vocabulary by means of Chinese or English definitions in senior high schools in China.Based on the learning transfer theory and the input and output hypothesis, the study tried to investigate the effects of using two different instructional strategies, namely the Chinese and English definitions, to teach English word pairs with the same Chinese translation and ones with different translations, with data being elicited by means of experiments and interviews from participants recruited from two intact classes in Miluo NO.1 high school, focusing on two specific questions: 1) To what extent does the use of Chinese and English definitions influence the accuracy of the English word pairs with the same Chinese translation? 2) To what extent does the use of Chinese and English definitions influence the accuracy of the English word pairs with different Chinese translations?The major findings are as follows: 1) For English word pairs with the same Chinese translation, both the strategies were proved effective, but compared with Chinese definitions, English ones can better improve the accuracy of vocabulary use, yielding a significant difference from the former one. 2) For English word pairs with different Chinese translations, both the strategies were proved effective, but compared with Chinese definitions, English ones can better improve the accuracy of vocabulary use, yielding a significant difference from the former one. The findings indicate that English definitions can better enhance vocabulary accuracy. Interview results also revealed that most of the senior high school students were willing to use English definitions to learn new vocabulary. To sum up, it’s feasible to use English definitions to teach new English vocabulary to senior high school students. It can also reduce the effects of negative transfer and help develop students’ thinking in the foreign language.The study is limited in that the experiment was conducted only in two intact classes and further research is expected to improve in related aspects.