Research on Contextual Memorizing of Meaning in Foreign Language Vocabulary

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of contexts in the memory of meaning in foreign vocabularies. Thestudy was based on the cognitive processing hierarchy theory of Craik and Lockhart (1972), the memory trace theoryof McClelland and Rumelhart (1986) and the memory trace theory of cognitive psychology. The subjects werenon-English majors freshmen. The contexts used in the study were list, sentence and text. Through timely test anddelay test, it was found that sentence performed better than text, which was different from expectation. After analysisand interview, some problems were found in this study.