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

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.