| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 106 === Numerous studies have been devoted to word associations in comparison and contrast of responses between different groups of participants or between different languages (Amer, 1980; Dalrymple-Alford & Aamiry, 1970), or to investigate word class influence on word association test results (Nissen & Henriksen, 2006). However, rather less attention has been paid to word association as a teaching method or strategy. Although Cohen & Aphek (1980) and Hopkins & Bean (1998) claimed the effectiveness of word association teaching method, the participants in those studies were students whose L1s were not Chinese. Besides, past studies (McCarthy, 1992; Pressly, Levin, & Miller, 1981; Thornbury, 2004) found that it might be hard or ineffective to use images to teach abstract words. Some research (Pressley et al., 1981) suggested the efficacy of sentence writing teaching method over visual aid teaching method while other research (Barcroft, 2004) claimed that visual aid was more effective than sentence writing.
Thus, the present study investigated the efficacy of the Word Association plus Learners’ Drawing Method in comparison to the Sentence Creation Method on young Chinese EFL learners’ L2 vocabulary knowledge. Students’ perceptions of the two vocabulary teaching methods were investigated as well. Two research questions were proposed:
(1) To what extent do young Chinese EFL learners increase their L2 vocabulary knowledge through the Word Association plus Learners’ Drawing Method in comparison to the Sentence Creation Method?
(2) What is the relationship between students’ perceptions of the two vocabulary teaching methods used in this study and actual outcomes?
Twenty six Taiwanese learners of English in an English cram school were recruited. All of them were grade five and grade six elementary school students who attended public Chinese-medium Taiwanese elementary school and had learned English for approximately five years. The participants were divided into two groups. One group was composed of 13 students who received the Sentence Creation Method and the other group included 13 leaners who were instructed the Word Association plus Learners’ Drawing Method. Before the experiment, an online free sample test from Cambridge English Young Learners tests series was used as the screening test to make sure that all participants were at the same proficiency level. English target words were six concrete nouns and six abstract nouns which were covered by the “Frequency List of Nouns” from the British National Corpus, the Elementary and Junior High School Vocabulary List (教育部國中小基本英語字彙1200字), and the word list of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) elementary level.
The results revealed that the Word Association plus Learners’ Drawing Method seemed to be more useful than the Sentence Creation Method in teaching both the concrete nouns and the abstract nouns. Furthermore, the results also revealed that both groups developed concrete noun knowledge better than the abstract noun knowledge after the treatment. That is, the two teaching methods were more effective for teaching the concrete nouns than the abstract nouns. The interview results showed that there were inconsistencies between learners’ preferences for these two teaching methods and their actual performance outcomes. Some pedagogical implications were offered to facilitate young L2 learners’ vocabulary teaching and learning.
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