The Effects Of Input Enhancement On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

As a by-product of any activity not explicitly geared to lexical acquisition, incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabulary growth. In the recent two decades, research at home and abroad has been conducted to examine several factors that may influence IVA through second language reading from many different perspectives. Among them, the effects of different reading tasks, vocabulary frequency and topic familiarity on IVA get the most concern. Little attention is paid to the effects of input enhancement, which appears in the present study as boldface and gloss. The present study tries to investigate the effects of input enhancement on IVA based on the theory of attention and Noticing Hypothesis.Specifically, the study addresses four research questions:(1) Does input enhancement have positive effects on IVA?(2) If it does, in which way can the acquisition be better facilitated in the immediate vocabulary knowledge scale test? (Neither boldface nor gloss, boldface, gloss, boldface plus gloss).(3) If it does, in which way can the acquisition be better facilitated in the delayed vocabulary knowledge scale test? (Neither boldface nor gloss, boldface, gloss, boldface plus gloss).(4) Does the subjects' vocabulary level influence the results of their incidental vocabulary acquisition?These questions were examined in an experimental study. One hundred non-English major freshmen learning English as a foreign language were involved .They were divided into four groups, with 25 in each. There were eight target words in the reading text, which were enhanced in different ways in different groups. In Group A, the reading text was the original one without any enhancement on the target words; in Group B, the target words were in boldface; in Group C, the target words were glossed with Chinese single gloss; in Group D, the target words were both in boldface and with Chinese single gloss. The reading comprehension questions in these four groups were the same. The experiment consisted of four steps: vocabulary level test, reading comprehension, immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test.After the tests, Statistics Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to compute descriptive statistics of the three tests' scores. One-way ANOVA was carried out to see whether there were significant differences among four groups in the short-term and long-term retention of those target words. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to see the relationship between the two vocabulary tests. Independent samples T test was applied to find out whether the influence of vocabulary level on IVA is significant or not.The major findings are:(1) The input enhancement does have positive effects on IVA through reading.(2) The target words with two kinds of input enhancement techniques leads to more attention than those with only one technique. And more noticing leads to more learning.(3) The target words with Chinese single gloss have a much better result on the incidental vocabulary acquisition than the ones in boldface.(4) The subjects' vocabulary level does have an influence on IVA. The subjects with a larger vocabulary size have a more likelihood of acquisition.Based on the results, some pedagogical implications are proposed. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research are also put forward.