Effects Of Distributed Practice On Junior High School Students’ Learning Of English Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the foundation of language learning,but for a long time the vocabulary learning of Chinese secondary school students has long been in the status quo of high input and low benefit,and the learning effect is not satisfactory.Therefore,how to effectively improve secondary school students’ English vocabulary has been a difficult problem for the English teaching community in China.Studies have shown that distributed teaching based on the spacing effect is an effective strategy to help students’ vocabulary learning,but most of the existing related studies have taken non-native Chinese speakers as the research participants,and not many have taken Chinese English learners as the research participants.In order to change the current situation of "long time but low efficiency" in English vocabulary learning for secondary school students and to improve the effectiveness of English vocabulary learning for Chinese learners,this study attempts to apply different distributed practices to secondary school students’ English vocabulary learning and to explore the differences in the teaching effects of different distributed practices under the spacing effect.Based on the skill acquisition theory and different distributed teaching methods,40 students in the first grade of a junior high school in Xindu District,Chengdu City were selected as the participants of the experiment,and the students were divided into equal and expanding spacing groups for a period of nine weeks.The participants of this study were 40 students in the first grade of a secondary school in Xindu District,Chengdu City,who were divided into the equal spacing group and the expanding spacing group.Three instruments: tests,VKS scales and interviews were used for data collection throughout the experiment,and an attempt was made to answer the following two research questions:1.What are the differences in the effects of expanding spacing and equal spacing on students’ short-term memory for vocabulary acquisition?2.What are the differences in the effects of expanding spacing and equal spacing on students’ long-term memory retention for vocabulary acquisition?The experimental research process was divided into five stages: the first stage was the selection and pre-test of the participants;the second stage was the selection of the words to be studied;the third stage was the implementation of the experiment;the fourth stage was the testing and filling of the VKS scale and the interview;and the fifth stage was the collection and analysis of the data.It is worth noticing that there were two tests:the post-test and the delayed-test.The post-test was administered one week after the completion of the study,while the delayed-test was administered two weeks after the completion of the post-test.Based on the analysis of the data from the post-test and the delayed-test,the data on the change of vocabulary cognitive level in the two VKS scales,and the data from the students’ interviews,the following conclusions can be drawn: the expanding spacing has a better effect on the students’ vocabulary retention than the equal spacing,as shown by the statistically significant advantage of the expanding spacing group over the equal spacing group in both post-test and delayed-test;the VKS scale after two tests also showed that the retention of vocabulary cognitive level in the expanding spacing group was more stable than that in the equal spacing group.In conclusion,this experiment demonstrates that expanding spacing is more effective in helping students to memorize vocabulary than equal spacing,and it is hoped that it will provide a valuable way for many English learners and teachers to teach and learn English vocabulary.