Effects Of DCT-based Vocabulary Teaching Method On Junior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary has always been the most fundamental and essential component of language learning.Although great attention has been paid to vocabulary teaching and learning in Chinese junior high schools for decades,it is still a struggling problem because it is rather difficult for students to memorize and master so many new words during their study.The traditional vocabulary teaching often makes students passively accept the knowledge by presenting them a huge amount of explanation and usage to memorize,so it always results in low efficiency and low interest in vocabulary learning.Dual Coding Theory is proposed by Allan Paivio in 1971,which includes two subsystems in human cognitive process:verbal system and nonverbal system.Compared with the traditional vocabulary teaching method,DCT-based vocabulary teaching method emphasizes the function of human’s nonverbal system and help students remember target words by generating corresponding images in their mind.Based on the above consideration,this paper intends to answer the following two research questions:1)What are the effects of DCT-based vocabulary teaching method on junior high school students’ vocabulary acquisition in terms of short-term memory and long-term memory?2)What are the effects of DCT-based vocabulary teaching method on junior high school students’ vocabulary learning interest?The research design was a quantitative research.110 students from two parallel classes of Grade 8 in Yangzhou Shuren School were selected to take part in an experiment lasting for 20 days.The instruments included a pre-test,an immediate post-test,a delayed post-test and a questionnaire.The pre-test was conducted to decide which class acted as EC and which class as CC.In the experiment,the DCT-based vocabulary teaching method was adopted in EC and traditional teaching method was employed in CC.Students in EC needed to complete the questionnaire twice before and after the experiment.Finally the scores of three vocabulary tests and the data of the questionnaire were put into database of SPSS 21.0 for windows to synthesize and analyze.The findings of the study were summarized as follows:(1)DCT-based vocabulary teaching method could effectively improve junior high school students’ short-term and long-term memory of vocabulary.(2)It could be concluded that DCT-based vocabulary teaching method had a positive effect on students’ vocabulary learning interest on the whole.More specifically,it produced significantly positive effects on students’ motivation of vocabulary learning and satisfaction with vocabulary teaching method,however,it had no obvious effect on students’ their confidence in vocabulary learning.Some pedagogical implications are advanced.First of all,teachers should help students notice nonverbal factors in vocabulary teaching and learning and ask them to form mental images simultaneously.Secondly,teachers should take student’s characteristic into consideration and guide them to adapt to DCT-based vocabulary teaching method and find out the most appropriate and effective way of English learning.Lastly,students should be encouraged to be conscious of the mental images of the new vocabularies in order to remember and recall target words more easily by activating these images.Some limitations and suggestions are put forward.Firstly,the size of participants in this study was not large enough to reach a more convincing conclusion.Participants from different grades,different schools,or even different cities should be chosen in further studies.Secondly,this study lasted for about 20 days and the number of vocabulary teaching experiment was quite small,so further studies should be carried out for a much longer time and more vocabulary teaching classes should be implemented.Thirdly,since the current research only studied the spelling,meanings and usage of words,further studies may include such factor as pronunciation and stress.Finally,some students might be distracted by the images in such a relatively relaxing class,so some uncontrolled and ambiguous factors,such as the distractions caused by the pictures should be eliminated.