| Researches in incidental vocabulary acquisition are prosperous abroad. In China, however, little attention is paid to it, let alone any empirical studies. Therefore, we have designed different reading tasks according to different reading purposes to explore the incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) of Chinese English-majors. And the present study is of considerable theoretical and practical significance. It is an empirical study carried on in the Foreign Languages University of PLA. The writer attempts to answer the following research questions: 1) Is IVA possible for the Chinese English-majors in their reading?2) Do different reading tasks affect their IVA? 3) If the answer to the second question is positive, then how do different reading tasks affect their IVA?4) Do other factors, such as vocabulary size and learning strategies, have impact on IVA in the same reading task?The learners' IVA gains and retentions are explored through one experiment, two tests and two surveys. Accordingto different reading purposes, the students can be divided into two groups: one is expected to "read and answer questions afterwards" and the other is supposed to "read and retell". The immediate test and the delayed test are used to check the IVA gains and retentions. A learning-strategy questionnaire and a vocabulary-size survey help to differentiate learners' variable. Two balanced classes, with 57 English majors in the Foreign Languages University of PLA, attended the investigation. They were initially balanced on (1) the number of students; (2) the ratio of learners with large vocabulary and with small vocabulary; and (3) the ratio of different learning strategy users. After collecting the scores of vocabulary tests, we make use of the statistic tool - SPSS version 10.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) to analyze the raw data. It mainly includes the following statistic methods:1) From the general description of statistical data, such as Mean and Standard Deviation, we get a general idea of how well the students perform in IVA gains and retentions.Conducting the independent T-test, we get to know2) whether the group differences in IVA gains and retentions are significant or not.3) And the Multivariate ANOVA indicates whether the cross effects of different variables on IVA gains and retentions are significantly different or not.With the above statistical methods, we have analyzed the empirical results and interpret them with McLaughlin's (1987) Information Processing Model. We finally come to the following conclusions: 1) This study has revealed that the reading purposes and the learner's vocabulary size have significant effects on IVA gains and retentions (p <.05). 2) To interpret the results, we employ the Information Processing Model, from the cognitive perspective. Learners can obtain IVA during reading and the task of "read and retell" promotes better IVA gains (immediate test: Mean =16.77 >11.74) and retentions (delayed test: Mean = 13.17 >8.11) than the one of "read and answer questions afterwards", for the workload involved in the former is much heavier than the workload involved in the latter. 3) The learners' vocabulary size also plays a significant role in IVA gains and retentions (immediate test: p =.000<.05; delayed test: p =.000 <.05). The learners with larger vocabulary perform better than those with smaller vocabulary (immediate test: Mean =19.58 > 10.03; delayed test: Mean =16.54 >5.94), for the former's automaticity is much higher than the latter's.The present study has great theoretical and practical significance in the English teaching and learning. The author proposes that it will be more effective for students to enlarge their vocabulary by extensive reading rather than through learning wordlists by rote; and that in order to improve students' efficiency in IVA gains and retentions, it is better for teachers to guide in their reading tasks and to foster their ability in guessing the meaning of an unknown word from...
|
PDF Full Text Request