Abstract:

This study investigated the impact of group collaboration and individual practice on American high school students’ Chinese vocabulary learning. Participants (N = 38) in the study were high school students enrolled in Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language courses in an urban public high school in the Midwestern region of the United States. During the study, half of the sample (n = 19) used the traditional individual exercises and individual tests while the others (n = 19) used the group discussions and group practices to learn Chinese vocabularies. Results of the mixed-design ANOVA revealed that both the Transition x Group interaction and the Transition main effect were significant (p < .05) with a large effect size and power. However, the Group main effect was not significant (p = .683). It is concluded that students using the group collaboration method had significantly (p = .010) better improvement than those using the traditional individual practice method in learning Chinese vocabularies for American high school students.

Keywords:

Vocabulary acquisition, collaborative learning, Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language, mixed-design ANOVA.