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4.2 Discussion

As revealed above, Chinese-to-English translation is more effective than English-to-Chinese translation in both immediate and delayed vocabulary tests. This may be due tothe several reasons.The first reason is that Chinese-to-English translation takes more time than English-to-Chinese translation. Translation is the process of shifting one language to anotherlanguage while keeping the same semantic meanings. According to psychologists, thetime bilinguals need to translate the L2 to LI is less than the time needed to translate theLI to L2 (Kroll & Curley, 1988; Kroll & Sholl, 1992； Kroll & Stewart, 1994). For Chinese-to-English bilinguals, the time they need to translate English to Chinese is less than thetime needed to translate Chinese to English. This is in accordance with what I found inthe experiment. When the students in both classes were asked to finish the translationtasks, the time limit was 40 minutes. The students who finished the Chinese-to-Englishtranslation task spent the whole 40 minutes while those who finished English-to-Chinesetranslation task spent less than 30 minutes. In other words, the Chinese-to-Englishtranslators spent more time on the translation materials and this may be one of the reasonswhy they acquired more words incidentally.The second reason is the involvement load. According to Laufer and Hulstijn'sInvolvement Load Hypothesis (2001), tasks with a strong involvement load will result inbetter retention. On the surface, it seems that the involvement load of the Chinese-to-English translation was the same as that of the English-to-Chinese translation, becausein the translation materials, the new words were glossed, and students did not have tolook up in the dictionary or guess the word meaning from the context. However, therewas an involvement load difference in the process of these two translation tasks. In theprocess of English-to-Chinese translation, the learners directly resorted to their mothertongue Chinese to find equivalents, which was conducted in a lexical level. In the processof Chinese-to-English translation conducted in a conceptual level (Kroll and Stewart,1994), the learners had to consult their Chinese mental lexicon in Chinese thinking, butThe last reason is the depth of processing according to Craik and Lockhart's Depthof Processing Model (1972). In the Depth of Processing Mode, there are two levels ofprocessing: shallow and deep. For example, processing the meaning of a new lexical itemtakes place at a rather deep level whereas processing the phonological form takes place at arather shallow level. This is in accordance with the studies of second language vocabularyby psycholinguists (Zhou, 2005). When Chinese English learners are identifying Englishwords, they first pay attention to the word's form, then the pronunciation, and finallythe word's meaning. While doing English to Chinese translation, the students just paidattention to the form of the glossed English words and directly wrote down the givenChinese meanings without thinking too much. However, the students who were doingChinese to English translation were more likely to remember the meanings of the wordsbecause of the pictographic nature of the Chinese characters and they would considerhow the words were used in their translation. This explains why the students who finishedEnglish-to-Chinese translat本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。