An Empirical Study of Vocabulary Acquisition in the Framework of Comprehensible Input
- 1 Institute of Education, University of Reading, Reading, UK
Abstract
Comprehensible input and vocabulary acquisition are viewed as the crucial components of second language acquisition. So as to further discuss the relationship between comprehensible input and second linguistic vocabulary acquisition, we conducted an empirical study at a university in Guangdong, the present study based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, investigates two main research questions: 1) Do different forms of comprehensible input cause significant differences in vocabulary acquisition? 2) Do different semantic types of vocabulary affect the efficiency of comprehensible input? This research uses a qualitative questionnaire to collect data and quantitative software SPSS to analyse the data. The results of this research indicated that: Different forms of CI (literal explanation and pictorial explanation) have no significant difference in vocabulary acquisition. Besides, only under the pictorial explanation of CI, the acquisition of common nouns is obviously more efficient than the acquisition of the technical terms. Under other conditions, there is no correlation between semantic categories of vocabulary and comprehensible input efficiency.
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