Abstract
ABSTRACT With the changing trend of teaching methodology, vocabulary has received increasing attention in the field of language teaching. Along the research line, a considerable number of studies have examined vocabulary learning strategies, the relationship between vocabulary and reading, and active and passive vocabulary. Yet, the issue of presenting words in semantic clusters (a set of semantically and syntactically similar words) and thematic clusters (a set of words having different parts of speech that are closely associated with a thematic concept) has rarely been explored. This study, thus, aimed to compare 1) the effects of learning words in semantic and thematic clusters and 2) the learning of 3 grammatical categories. In this study, an intact class of 46Life Science majors who were enrolled in a Freshman English Course at National Tsing Hua University in 2002 participated in a 6-week experiment. As a repeated-measures design was adopted, all the subjects received the same treatment, i.e., all of them received 6 consecutive weeks of instruction, including semantic and thematic clusters, followed by an immediate posttest. To further explore the long-term learning effects on the intended comparisons, a delayed posttest was administered after a lapse of one month. The results revealed that overall semantic clusters had more occurrences of interference than thematic clusters in the immediate and delayed posttests, but no difference was found in the learning between semantic and thematic clusters. Interestingly, for semantic clusters, the subjects performed better in nouns than verbs or adjectives while for thematic clusters, adjectives were found to be learned better than nouns or verbs. As to the long-term retention, the delayed posttest showed similar results. The findings drawn from this study suggest that the effects of learning semantic clusters seems to be the same as those of learning thematic clusters with the incorporation of instruction and semantic mapping. Interference effects, on the other hand, do not appear to influence learning vocabulary to a great extent as interference errors take up a relatively small percentage of overall errors learners committed. Two different rankings were found for the difficulty level of learning grammatical categories, which indicates that the difficulty level of grammatical categories is likely to vary, depending on factors such as the schemata, word form and pronunciation. The current investigation has provided some insights and established a preliminary foundation. Future research is, thus, needed to be conducted to reexamine the learning effects between semantic and thematic clusters as well as the grammatical categories.