Research on Contextual Memorizing of Meaning in Foreign Language Vocabulary

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