An Investigation of Two Ways of Teaching Vocabulary to L2 Learners

As for language learners, vocabulary acquisition is one of the most important tasks, and the same goes for L2 teachers.Recently, some researchers claim that semantic mapping is far more effective in vocabulary. The present study comparatively investigate two strategies of teaching vocabulary to non-English lower-intermediate learners. One is the traditional grammatical description and drilling way, the other is the semantic mapping. Six new words were taught by using these two ways respectively,and a sample test was applied to check students' mastery of these words at the end of the class. The test results show that there is no significant difference between the learning outcomes of these two different teaching approaches, but learners turned out to be more engaged when the teacher conducted the semantic links teaching method. Therefore, perhaps, a combination of these two approaches would be a good choice for those L2 learners.