An Investigation of Semantic Cluster Helps Listening Comprehension of English Learners: A Case-study in Pass College

DOI

10.2991/msmi-14.2014.108How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Working Memory, Sematic Cluster, Thematic Cluster, Vocabulary Strategy, Listening Comprehension.

Abstract

This paper introduces Daneman and Carpenter’s test of working memory span, and taking the use of Chinese language materials collected by Chinese Language Education Research Center’s bilingual corpus does a 3 week’s experiment with both English majors and non-English majors in Pass College of CTBU (Chongqing Technology and Business University). The experimental group has 10 minutes vocabulary cluster training semantically and thematically before they start their English listening comprehension practice. Teachers introduce 1-2 vocabulary clusters, which includes two tasks (short-term memorizing within 10 words and predicting the sentences of options according to the vocabulary cluster).The overall results of new words acquisition reveals that semantic clusters are slightly better than thematic clusters. There is no statistically significant difference between presenting English words in semantic clusters or in thematic clusters in the acquisition or retention of new words. It indicates that the vocabulary teaching methods used most frequently by English teachers in the classroom were also the strategies most consistently uses in words learning by the subjects of this study and suggested that explicit teaching of vocabulary learning strategies could be helpful in semantic clusters.

Copyright

© 2014, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhuo Li
AU  - Zheng-Jun Wu
PY  - 2014/06
DA  - 2014/06
TI  - An Investigation of Semantic Cluster Helps Listening Comprehension of English Learners: A Case-study in Pass College
BT  - Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Management Science and Management Innovation
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 608
EP  - 613
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/msmi-14.2014.108
DO  - 10.2991/msmi-14.2014.108
ID  - Li2014/06
ER  -