Abstract:

English language, an international mainstream language, has become indispensable in the current world even in the future. It is well known that vocabulary is the foundation of the English language study. The methods of vocabulary retention are always a major subject of hot discussion in the tide of English learning nowadays. The studies related to vocabulary retention have emerged in large numbers especially in the memory methods. This thesis, based on the relevance theory, divides the mnemonic devices, compared with the traditional mechanical memory method, into four categories--- dictionary use, context memory, word formation, association memory. At the same time, this thesis combines many researchers’ academic researches and students’ daily learning experience. The thesis tries to find effective methods to help English learners enhance the efficiency of studying vocabulary and language learning.

Keywords: English vocabulary; vocabulary retention ; classification of methods

摘  要：

英语语言作为一种国际性交流的主流语言，在当今乃至未来世界都是不可或缺的。众所周知，英语词汇是英语语言学习的基础。如今在学习英语的潮流中，记忆词汇的方法一直都是大家讨论的一个热门话题。有关词汇记忆这方面的研究不胜枚举，尤其是记忆方法的研究更是不计其数。本文结合了前人对词汇记忆方法的研究成果以及学生日常学习经验，以关联理论为记忆思想基础，与传统的机械记忆法作对比，将词汇记忆方法分为词典法、语境记忆法、构词法、联想法。本文希望能够找出有效的记忆方法来提高对英语词汇乃至英语语言学习的效率。

关键词：英语词汇；词汇记忆；方法分类

1 Introduction
Vocabulary learning plays a vital role in English study. The size of vocabulary has an essential influence on people’s comprehensive development of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. However, restricted by the traditional culture and negative transfer of Chinese language, most Chinese individuals, lacking the English environment, tend to utilize the mechanical way to memorize vocabularies tautologically. It often makes the memory efficiency poor whereas the forgetting rate is obviously high. As a result, it is hard for most learners to continue adhering to the English study. So sensible methods of memorizing vocabularies can achieve twice the result with half the effort in learning the second language, “acquired by a person in addition to his mother tongue”.（Vivian Cook, 2010) This paper mainly elucidates the methods of memorizing the English vocabularies in order to help learners study words better and easier.