THE IMPACT OF EXPLICIT VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION ON L2 ADVANCED CHINESE LEARNERS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION

This classroom study of Chinese as a foreign language investigates the impact of explicit vocabulary instruction on students’ vocabulary growth and knowledge as measured by translation and speaking test. Eight students in a college-level Advanced Chinese course participated in the study. Students received systematic and robust vocabulary instruction on 45 words, 15 words from each of the three thematic units of study over the course of nine weeks. The findings show that in post-tests on all 45 words, all students improved in the translation assessment and were able to use the majority of the target words in the prompted picture description assessment and in the unprompted recall assessment. Further analysis of the translation assessment results revealed that the correctness rate was higher if the words were more imageable and the conceptual fields of the Chinese and English words were close. A survey was conducted to explore how students changed their approach to studying vocabulary and their opinions on various vocabulary activities they experienced in class. The study showed that students changed their orientation to vocabulary study and now study words in sentences related to a meaningful context rather than as discrete items in a word list. The pedagogical implications of the study are presented in the last section of dissertation in practice