Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

It is well known that vocabulary is the most essential part for learners to master a secondlanguage. Just as Wilkins (1972:111) put it, “without grammar, little can be conveyed; withoutvocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.” “Word is the basic unit of meaning, and meaning plays acentral role in the respect of the production, recognition, storage and retrieval of language” (GuiShichun, 1983:213). Limited vocabulary will affect the development of other languageknowledge and skills (Chen Xiaotang&Zheng Min, 2002). And vocabulary learning can promotethe improvement of a person’s English level (Wen Qiufang, 2004) .However, many middle school students in China have found it difficult to learn vocabularywell. The traditional vocabulary teaching mainly lays the emphasis on the new words listed inthe textbook, which contributes to the students learning new words in a rigid and isolated way.Teacher simply makes clear the pronunciation, formation and meaning of the words in sequencewhile the students memorize them mechanically. For another, although students learn manywords everyday, they have to spend much time repeating them over and over again in order tomaster them. They complain that it is time-consuming and frustrating to memorize words.Therefore, English teachers should purposely teach students some effective strategies andcultivate their awareness of strategy use in vocabulary learning. As the proverb says: Give a mana fish and you feed him a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Semanticfield theory as one of the most important theories in semantics provides a different perspectivefor vocabulary learning. As such, in order to help students master certain effective vocabularylearning strategies, the present study aims to explore how to apply semantic association invocabulary teaching and to find out whether it can promote students’ vocabulary learning.

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1.2 Current Situation of Vocabulary Learning

In English teaching at Vocation High Schools, it is a common phenomenon that English as ageneral course hasn’t been attatched enough importance compared with other specialized courses.That is because vocational education is a kind of education aimed at developing highly skilledtalents for the work force. In order to be skillful in a given profession, most students choose toattend the vocational schools. From their point of view, English is of no use at all, they willsurely not make a living by English in the future. Consequently, most of them are with lowinterest and motivation in learning English. Actually, they need to face a series of problems such as the poor English learning ability, their indefinite goals of learning, negative self-assessmentand so on, which make them lose further interest in learning vocabulary. Therefore, it is veryimportant to raise students’ interest, change their negative attitude and passive ways of learningso that they can learn English on their own initiative.In traditional English teaching, vocabulary learning hasn’t obtained the proper value andattention due to the restrictions of teaching tasks. Vocabulary have seldom been set as teachingimportant and difficult points, teachers are accustomed to teaching with the mode of “reading -explaination - dictation”. As a result, such a teaching method stifles the students’ learninginterests and enthusiasm. From the results of daily tests, most of students’ vocabulary is notincreased significantly in three years. However, according to the requirement of the syllabus,students at Vocational High School have to master 1700 - 1900 words, but the current situation isfar away from this goal. This brings about greater difficulties to the learners. Thus the presentstudy aims to explore some effective vocabulary learning strategies for vocational high schoolstudents so as to help them solve problems and build up confidence in vocabulary learning.

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Theoretical Basis of the Study

According to Wikipedia, a semantic field is a technical term in the discipline of linguisticsto describe a set of words grouped by meaning in a certain way. The term is also used in otheracademic disciplines, such as anthropology and computational semiotics. (Brinton, 2000) defines“semantic field” or “semantic domain” and relates the linguistic concept to hyponymy: “ Relatedto the concept of hyponymy, but more loosely defined, is the notion of a semantic field ordomain. A semantic field denotes a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words. Thewords in a semantic field share a common semantic property.” (Brinton& Laurel, 2000)A general description is that words in a semantic field are not synonymous, but are used totalk about the same general phenomenon. A meaning of a word is dependent partly on its relationto other words in the same conceptual area. The types of semantic fields vary from culture toculture. Andersen (1990) identifies the traditional usage of “semantic field” theory as:“ traditionally, semantic fields have been used for comparing the lexical structure of differentstates of the same language.”

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2.2 Semantic Association

Semantic association is known as the most important and widely-used among different kindsof associations (Nation, 2001). The associations of a word influence the way it is stored in ourmind, and affect the extraction of the word. Semantic association comes from the establishmentof various image relationships according to the characteristics of words’ meaning, priorknowledge and experience as well, which can combine the old and new knowledge organicallyand produce a common influence. If we are able to find out the proper and reasonableassociations of words, it will be much easier to learn and memorize it. Consequently, we aresupposed to construct its corresponding relationships with other related words when learningnew words.

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Chapter 3 Research Design ........ 12

3.1 Hypotheses and Research Questions .........12

3.2 Subjects ....12

3.3 Research Instruments ....13

3.4 Design of Experiment....14

3.5 Training Procedure ........17

3.6 Samples of Word Association Exercises ..........19

3.7 Data Collection and Analysis ......20

Chapter 4 Results and Discussion........ 22

4.1 Effects of Semantic Association on Memory ....22

4.2 Effects of Semantic Association on Vocabulary Increase ......24

4.3 Effects on Interests and Confidence in Vocabulary Learning .......24

4.4 Discussions on Major Findings ....26

4.5 Summary .........29

Chapter 5 Conclusion ...... 30

5.1 Summary of the Study....30

5.2 Implications of the Study ......30

5.3 Limitations of the Study ........31

5.4 A Few Notes for Strategy Training......32

Chapter 4 Results and Discussion

4.1 Effects of Semantic Association on Memory

The effect of semantic association strategies on students’ vocabulary memory can beunderstood from the comparison of their learning outcome in experiment. As such, the scores ofvocabulary paper were analyzed statistically in SPSS 17.0 to check out whether the scores of twosamples have any significant differences or not. In order to find out whether the semantic association strategies can contribute to thevocational high school students’ vocabulary memory, an Independent Samples Test wasconducted among two parallel classes. Results of data analysis are revealed in the table below.

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Conclusion

This chapter makes conclusions for the present study. Both theoretical and practicalsignificance will be made on the basis of the results. And then the limitations and suggestions forfuture study will also be presented. The study indicates that students benefited a lot from 6-week English vocabulary semanticassociation strategy training. The students in experiment class can employ semantic associationto memorize words effectively. They gradually became interested in vocabulary learning andwere willing to devote more time and energy to apply semantic association strategies. Therefore,the semantic association-based vocabulary teaching and learning has had a significant effect onvocational high school students’ vocabulary learning. In the light of previous discussions, thefollowing conclusions can be reached:

1) Semantic association can help students memorize and retain the words in a more effectiveway.

2) Semantic association does contribute to enlarging students’ vocabulary significantly.

3) Students begin to acquire confidence in vocabulary learning and show greater interestthan ever before.

4) Students get a better knowledge of words as a whole.

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Reference (omitted)