| Vocabulary plays a vital role in English learning,especially in the crucial period of junior high school when students are laying the foundation for future English learning,and most of the vocabularies learned during this period are the core vocabularies.However,the inappropriate vocabulary presentation methods and high forgetting rate are common problems in middle school students’vocabulary learning.Based on the cognitive psychology,how people understand and process information depends on how the information presented,moreover,the degree to which people understand information directly affects their memory retention.To be brief,according to different situations and specific teaching objectives,teachers can choose a reasonable and effective presentation method to improve students’vocabulary memory effect.Therefore,it is of great value and significance to explore how to improve the vocabulary memory effect of junior high school students by selecting the right way of vocabulary presentation.Based on Information-processing theory,semantic field theory,and cognitive psychology memory theory,this study aimed at finding the influence of vocabulary presentation methods(semantic field presentation method and contextual presentation method)on vocabulary memory of intermediate students in junior high school.134 junior high school students are selected from the 9~thh grade to form two intact classes.On this basis,by integrating the average scores of three recent test results,the students are divided into three different learning levels:excellent students,intermediate students and less advanced students.After calculation,31 students with intermediate learning levels in each class were selected as subjects.In EC(A),the researcher used the contextual presentation method to teach new words for students,and in EC(B),the researcher applied the semantic field presentation method to teach new words.Then students were asked to use the different presentation methods to memorize the vocabularies.After that,the subjects were given a test for short-term memory,and a week later,they were given a long-term memory test.What needs illustration is that the content,form and test time of the two tests are the same.After the experiment,SPSS 22.0 was used to do the independent samples for pretest,independent samples for short-term memory test,and paired samples correlation for short-term memory test and long-term memory test,then the following conclusions were drawn:First,in short-term memory,the effect of semantic field presentation method is better than contextual presentation method,but in long-term memory,contextual presentation method is better than semantic field presentation method.Based on the above conclusions,pedagogical implications are as followed:In the actual English teaching,if the learner’s goal is to keep the vocabularies for a long time,it is recommended that teachers present vocabularies through context,and if students need to memorize a large number of vocabularies in a short time,it is recommended to present them through the semantic field presentation.All in all,in vocabulary teaching,there is not the best presentation method,but the most suitable one,so in the process of teaching,based on specific target and the actual situation,teachers should apply a suitable presentation method to present new words. |
