Effect Of Micro-Lecture Videos On Senior High School Students' English Vocabulary Learning

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of micro-lecture videos on senior high school students' vocabulary learning.Vocabulary,one of the three elements(pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar),is the basic material of language.Wilkins(1972)points out that;"without grammar,very little can be conveyed,without vocabulary,nothing can be conveyed".There are relatively few researches exploring the effect of micro-lecture videos on senior high school students,English vocabulary learning,and the related empirical studies are even rarer.So,theoretically the study enriches the researches on the application of micro-lecture videos and provides pedagogical methods for students to improve their English vocabulary learning.Based on the Cognitive Load Theory and Input Hypothesis,the empirical study aimed to answer the following two questions:(1)What effect do micro-lecture videos have on senior high school students' English vocabulary learning?(2)What attitude do senior high school students have towards micro-lecture videos on vocabulary learning?The experiment employed both quantitative and qualitative designs,lasting for about two months.In the quantitative design,the participants were 100 students from two parallel classes and her five colleagues.The instruments involved a pre-test and two post-tests.The materials included Student's Book 3,Advance with English and micro-lecture videos.Students in EC were offered micro-lecture videos to learn the target vocabulary,and all the participants sat for the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test.Data was collected and analyzed by the researcher and her colleagues.In the qualitative design,the subjects were six students from EC.The instrument included the semi-structured interview questions to find students' attitudes towards the use of micro-lecture videos.All the subjects were required to answer the questions separately in the teacher's office.There are two major findings:Firstly,although micro-lecture videos had little effect on senior high school students' immediate retention of target vocabulary,they had better effects on senior high students' delayed retention of target vocabulary.The possible reason might be that learners could retain more information by what they see and hear for a much longer time.Secondly,students generally held the positive attitudes towards micro-lecture videos applied in English vocabulary learning.In their opinion,micro-lecture videos did help students expand English vocabulary volume,improve their autonomous learning ability,develop their interest in learning English vocabulary and memorize words and expressions for a much longer time.Pedagogical implications are listed as follows:(1)Designing appropriate micro-lecture videos based on students' competence.(2)Applying micro-lecture videos to other aspects of English learning.(3)Rearranging the students' learning time to avoid the distraction from the Internet.There are some limitations of this study:Firstly,only 100 students were involved,so the findings of this research might not be representative.Secondly,words and expressions of two units were included in the research and the experiment only lasted for about two months.Last but not the least,the two post-tests were designed by the researcher and her colleagues,so the validity and reliability couldn't be guaranteed.Here are some suggestions for further study:first of all,the students chosen to participate in the experiment should come from different grades or different schools.In addition,the future researches should deal with a larger volume of vocabulary and last for a longer time.Finally,more scientific post-tests should be used to investigate senior high school students' vocabulary learning to guarantee the validity and reliability of the tests.