体育英语教材内容体系.doc

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体育英语专业教材内容体系建构

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Research on the Construction of Professional Teaching Material Content System in Sports English

A Thesis Submitted
to Foreign Language Department of

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

By

Supervisor：

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to all those who helped me during the writing of this thesis.
My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to my supervisor, Ren Feng, for his constant encouragement and guidance. He has walked me through all the stages of the writing of this thesis. Without his consistent and illuminating instruction, this thesis could not have reached its present form.
I also owe a special debt of gratitude to all the teachers in Foreign Languages Department, from whose devoted teaching and enlightening lectures I have benefited a lot and academically prepared for the thesis.
Last but not the least, my thanks would go to my beloved family for their loving considerations and great confidence in me all through these years. I also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who gave me their help and time in listening to me and helping me work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis.

摘要
本文通过优化建设的原则，即通过强调人才培养定位的原则，科学化原则，系统化原则和与时俱进原则，探讨了体育英语课程体系优化建设的理念；研究了其教学目标，知识体系和课程优化的设置，并经过全面分析相关院系同类专业课程的设置，实地调查同类专业毕业生工作情况，访问听取用人单位的评价和意见，科学合理地构建出了英语语言知识和体育专业知识相结合的分层次的不同板块的体育英语课程优化体系，即英语语言课，体育英语基础课和体育英语专业课，在学好英语语言基本功的基础上，强化体育英语，增加体育专业双语和全英语课程，从而更好地实现人才培养目标，使我院体育英语专业的毕业生在以后的发展中具有更强的竞争力和适应力。
关键词：体育英语;　课程体系;　优化建设

Abstract
By the principle of optimized construction,namely,the principle of talents training orientation ,the principle of science,the principle of system and the principle of advancing with the times,this paper probes into the concept of the construction of sports English course system optimization,studying the teaching goal,the knowledge system and curriculum optimization settings. a large number of vocabulary words and numerous grammatical structures. Vocabulary acquisition is a principal issue for English learning because vocabulary comprises the basic building blocks of English. However, it is proved to be a major obstruction to English learning, which is mostly presented as forgetting too fast. Therefore, many scholars focus their attention on how to improve the efficiency of English vocabulary acquisition. Based on the analysis of Forgetting Curve of Ebbinghaus and the major problems in the process of English vocabulary acquisition, the thesis explores some learning strategies to promote the efficiency of English vocabulary acquisition in hope of providing some help to the English vocabulary teaching.
Keywords: vocabulary acquisition; the forgetting curve; memory retention; acquisition strategy

III
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements I
摘要 II
Abstract III
Table of Contents IV
Part One Introduction 1
Part Two English Vocabulary Acquisition 2
2.1 The Concept of Language Acquisition 2
2.2 Vocabulary Acquisition 2
Part Three Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve 4
3.1 A Brief Introduction of the Forgetting Curve 4
3.2 The Influence of Different Materials on Memory Effect 6
Part Four The Application of the Forgetting Curve in English Vocabulary Acquisition 7
4.1 Strategies of English Vocabulary Acquisition 8
4.1.1 Activating English vocabulary in Regular Intervals 9
4.1.2 Using Spaced Repetitions 9
4.1.3 Brainstorming 9
4.2 Stepped Contextual Mnemonics 9
4.2.1 Half-month Stepped Plan 9
4.2.2 Memorizing in Context 10
Part Five Conclusions and Pedagogical Implications 12
5.1 Conclusions 12
5.2 Pedagogical Implications 12
Works Cited 13

IV
Part One Introduction
There is no doubt that English plays an important role in people’s life throughout the world, where people speak English as their first language or they use it as a second or foreign language.
English learning involves a large amount of memorization. Vocabulary acquisition is considered to be one of the most important aspects in language acquisition. It closely related to listening, speaking, reading and writing, so vocabulary development is regarded as the basis for the development of language skills. Without mastering a certain amount of vocabulary, it is impossible to learn listening, speaking, reading and writing. A solid vocabulary is necessary in every stage of language learning .
While lacking of vocabulary is the main problem to most English learners, for they can not put them into their memory permanently. The reason for this bad situation is that most English learners don’t have a right method in vocabulary acquisition.
In terms of the information acquisition process, memorization consists of inputting, encoding, storage and retrieval. English learners generally put emphasis on the stage of encoding, and researchers have been searching for ways to effectively enhance students’ acquisition of new words and put forward series of methods such as associative memory, word-formation and so on. Though those methods do have improved memory effect to some extent, they cannot solve the problem fundamentally for the lack of emphasis on memory retention.
Hermann Ebbinghaus, a famous psychologist in German, studied the forgetting behavior of human beings and drew the famous Forgetting Curve. He told us the truth that there are two kinds of memory：short-term memory and long-term memory. The short-term memory is formed after we get the information. But we will forget the information soon if we don’t give it a timely review. On the contrary, the short-term memory will turn into the long-term memory with timely review and application. Thereby, the information will be kept in mind for a long time.
Therefore, to have a good memory of vocabulary, students must enhance the memory right after they meet the new vocabulary and give it as much application as possible. Only in this way can they have a firm memory of vocabulary, and will have a good command of English.
Based on these cases, this thesis tries to put forward some effective vocabulary acquisition strategies combined with Ebbinhaus’s Forgetting Curve.
Part Two English Vocabulary Acquisition
2.1 The Concept of Language Acquisition
In dictionary, the noun “acquisition” has 4 senses: 1. the act of contracting or assuming or acquiring possession of something 2. something acquired 3.the cognitive process of acquiring skill or knowledge 4. an ability that has been acquired by training (Audio E Online Dictionary). In the process of vocabulary acquisition, learners mainly acquire the connotative meaning of vocabulary words. Therefore this thesis mainly talks about the third meaning of it.
Language acquisition is a term which refers to the process of learning a native or a second language, in which vocabulary acquisition plays a fundamental role. The acquisition of native languages is studied primarily by developmental psychologists and psycholinguists. However, the acquisition of second or foreign languages is studied primarily by applied linguists. Generally, people rarely become as fluent in a second or foreign language as in their native tongue. Most traditional methods for learning a second or foreign language involve some systematic approaches to the analysis and comprehension of grammar as well as to the memorization of vocabulary.
2.2 Vocabulary Acquisition
The process of vocabulary acquisition can be simplified into recursive stages that are usually referred to as “semantization” and “consolidation”. At the first stage, the formal characteristics of a word are matched with semantic content. At the second stage, a newly acquired word is fit into the learner’s permanent memory. These two stages are strongly interrelated．In terms of the mental lexicon, a new lemma is created for a newly encountered word. The word not only is attached to particular meanings but will be included in a network of semantically related words, and the success of semantization is dependent on the degree to which words can be fit into this semantic network. In the case of a polysemous word, the learner would have to create separate lemmas for each separate sense of the word, so the semantization process should be aided if the learner recognizes the meaning relation between the word’s separate senses.
In the process of acquisition, memory occupies an important place. There are two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. Information in short-term memory is kept for only a few seconds, usually by repeating the information over and over. For example, you look up a number in the telephone book, and before you dial, you repeat the number over and over and you can remember it long enough to dial them. While, the latter concerns the wide range of ways in which experiences can affect behavior many years later, which refers to the continuing storage of information. In Freudian psychology, the long-term memory would be called the preconscious and unconscious. This information is largely outside of our awareness, but can be called into working memory to be used when needed. Some of this information is fairly easy to recall, while other memories are much more difficult to access. [3]
Through the process of association and rehearsal, the content of short-term memory can become long-term memory. While long-term memory is also susceptible to the forgetting process, long-term memories can last from a matter of days to as long as many decades.
Therefore, this thesis tries to find some learning strategies to help turn the short-term memory into long-term memory in the process of English vocabulary acquisition.

Part Three Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve
3.1 A Brief Introduction of the Forgetting Curve
In 1885, Ebbinghaus published his groundbreaking Über das Gedächtnis ( "On Memory", later translated to English as Memory. A Contribution to Experimental Psychology ) in which he described experiments he conducted on himself to describe the processes of learning and forgetting.
Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first to study the forgetting behavior in an experimental, scientific way. In his work, he was determined to show that higher mental processes were not hidden from view, but rather, could be studied using experimentation. To control most potentially confounding variables, Ebbinghaus wanted to use simple acoustic encoding and maintenance rehearsal for which a list of words could have been used. The reasoning behind his use of the nonsense syllables was that learning would be affected by prior knowledge and people’s understanding of the words. Furthermore, the easily formable associations between regular words would interfere with his results. He thus had to look for something that could be easily memorized but without any previous cognitive associations attached. This method allowed for an inexhaustible amount of new combinations of quite homogeneous character. For these purposes he used something that would later be called “nonsense syllables”. A nonsense syllable is a consonant-vowel-consonant combination, where the consonant does not repeat, and the syllable does not have any prior meaning. Syllables such as KAF and WID would all be acceptable. Then he performed a series of tests on himself over various time periods, reading out the syllables and attempting to recall them at the end of the procedure. And according to the resultant data, he acquired the following data——the forgetting curve (Fig.1), which describes the exponential curve that illustrates how fast learners tend to forget the information they had learned. The sharpest decline is in the first twenty minutes, then in the first hour, and then the curve evens off after about one day. [1]
Fig.1 The Forgetting Curve of Ebbinghaus
In the study of psychology, someone once drew a memory curve according to the relationship among a review times, the time interval and velocity forget. This curve can explain two problems: one is that the more times the repetitions last, the slower learners will forget ; the other shows that forgotten speed is not simply proportional to the time interval, but fast at first and slow down later.
Later, Ebbinghaus has used the method of written meaningless syllables to study. He find that, after memorizing, only an hour, he forget the 56%, and two days later he forget the 16%, then the speed of the forgotten significantly slow down., which shows that reviewing at the first time should be in time, and the content of the new study is better to be reviewed in 12 hours, so the memory learners seized is still clear, and memory in brain with the more information is strengthened. The second review can last for a long time interval, for example, two days. Further back, learners can get a longer interval, such as in turn for a week, half mouth, one mouth, half a year, a year, a few years. The amount of time of review will in turn shorten, even review as long as with the eyes or ears. Such as the load is heavy first and then become light, the effect is excellent.
In terms of this founding and analysis, timely consolidate and review what learners have learnt before it slip from their memory until they can firmly keep it in their mind forever should be an effective strategy.
3.2 The Influence of Different Materials on Memory Effect
Everybody has made the experience that learning can be both fun and tedious depending on the setting. If there is something, which is really interesting to learners, then learning is a breeze and most things can stick easily in their memory. However, learning things, which are uninteresting and boring, is much more unpleasant. And whatever learners have learned evaporates quickly out of their head again.
In experiences, Ebbinghaus also found that it would need to repeat 16.5 times to remember 12 nonsense syllables, and 54 times to remember 36 nonsense syllables; while, it would only need 8 times to remember 480 syllables of 6 poems, which proves that the more interesting the memory materials are, the more easily they could be memorized. And since the forgetting curve is in terms of nonsense syllables, Ebbinghaus achieved different kinds of forgetting curves in terms of different materials. But generally they are similar, which is shown in Fig.2 and Fig.3 below.

Fig.2 The Forgetting Curve Fig.3 The Forgetting Curve (in terms of different materials)
Those curves show that the forgetting rapidity of meaningful materials is much slower than that of nonsense ones. Thus, choosing memory materials or organizing memory materials should also be considered as effective methods of memorization.

Part Four The Application of the Forgetting Curve in English Vocabulary Acquisition
According to the f