| English vocabulary learning is influenced by both teaching methods and learners’ cognitive factors.Vocabulary presentation mode and cognitive load are generally considered to be important factors influencing vocabulary learning.Sweller(1988)believed that cognitive load was the total amount of psychological activity produced by learners in the process of learning and problem solving,including intrinsic cognitive load,extraneous cognitive load and germane cognitive load,the sum of which was the total amount of cognitive load.What’s more,extraneous cognitive load,produced for inappropriate presentation of teaching materials,will hinder the efficiency of learning by reducing the capacity of working memory.Therefore,the core idea of cognitive load theory is to minimize extraneous cognitive load caused by the organization and presentation of learning materials,so that learners can reasonably use limited cognitive resources to achieve the best learning effect.In recent years,the research on vocabulary presentation has been fruitful,but the existing studies fail to take the role of cognitive load in presentation and performance into account.Therefore,in this paper,the author attempts to combine the cognitive load theory with the actual teaching of English vocabulary,and conducts relatively detailed experiments and analysis based on the specific and different vocabulary presentation modes and the cognitive load theory.Specifically,this research is designed to find out:(1)the correlation between senior high school students’ vocabulary achievement and their cognitive load as well as the differences in vocabulary achievement between the group with high cognitive load and the group with low cognitive load;(2)the differences in the cognitive load and vocabulary achievement under different vocabulary presentation modes in the immediate posttest;(3)the differences in the cognitive load and vocabulary achievement under different vocabulary presentation modes in the delayed posttest.In this paper,137 senior high school students from a middle school in Gan Zhou city,Jiang Xi province were selected as the research objects.The data were collected by using the Cognitive Load Subjective Rating Scale compiled by Paas(1992)as well as the immediate and delayed vocabulary test paper,which were statistically analyzedby SPSS.The results are as the following.Firstly,the cognitive load was negatively correlated with the vocabulary achievement.In other words,the participants reporting a lower cognitive load perform better in the vocabulary test whereas the ones who report a higher cognitive load perform worse.Besides,a significant difference between the two groups in vocabulary achievement is produced.The average vocabulary score of the group with low cognitive load is significantly higher than that of the group with high cognitive load.Secondly,in the immediate posttest,there was no significant difference in students’ vocabulary memory performance under the three ways of vocabulary presentation,but the students’ cognitive load was the lowest under the way of word-list presentation and the highest in the contextual presentation mode.Presentation through images lay between the two.Finally,in the delayed test,students in the contextual presentation group performed the best in vocabulary test and had the lowest cognitive load.While presentation through word list is the worst way in vocabulary retention and the cognitive load is in the highest level.As for the presentation through images,it also lays between the two.The findings in this study have significant pedagogical and practical implications on vocabulary teaching and learning.The findings can urge teachers to pay more attention to the impact of vocabulary presentation mode and materials on students’ cognitive load,and reduce the negative impact of cognitive load on learning through appropriate teaching design and teaching materials,as well as methods that respect individual differences of learners,so as to improve students’ vocabulary learning performance. |
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