An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Different Presentation Modes On Vocabulary Retention Of Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is one of the most important elements of language, and vocabulary acquisition is playing an increasingly important role in second language learning. So in English teaching, the status of vocabulary teaching is self- evident. And as an important part of vocabulary teaching, vocabulary presentation has got more and more concern in recent years. Compared with the vocabulary learning strategies, however,the researches of vocabulary presentation are in minority in China. Vocabulary presentation is the process that the target vocabulary is presented to the second language learners in a certain way or method. Effective presentation can strengthen learners' memory for the target words and enhance learning effects.Based on the input hypothesis, the theory of semantic fields, guessing strategy and information-processing theory, the present research tries to explore the effects of two different vocabulary presentation modes(context and semantic field) on vocabulary retention in Senior High School students. In the experiment, 79 subjects are selected from Grade 2 of Dong Jiang Middle School in Heyuan, Guangdong province. 100 target words from New Senior English for China Student' s Book 4published by People' s Education Press have been chosen as the experiment materials.In the study, all the subjects accepted the immediate tests and also the delayed tests one week later. At the end of the experiment, there were questionnaire and interview to the subjects. The purpose is to get a further finding to the result of the study. In the end, all the data has been analyzed by the social science statistical software SPSS22.0.Through careful analysis of the experimental data and discussion, the following conclusions have been conducted:(1) Presenting the target words with the help of the context enforce the subjects' vocabulary short gains and long retention. In addition,the subjects' interest in learning new words was aroused under the effect of the context presentation mode.(2) Compared with the context presentation mode, the semantic field presentation mode did not achieve good effect on students' vocabularyretention. It takes time to get used to the semantic field presentation mode for the middle school students.(3) Most subjects prefer the context presentation mode to the semantic presentation mode, and they show positive attitude to the former.In the end, some pedagogical implications and suggestions are given based on the teaching and experiment process as well as the results of the study. Students are willing to learn new vocabularies in the context they are interested in, and they will be involved in the vocabulary learning activities in a more positive way.