Effects Of Different Reading Tasks On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention

In recent years,incidental vocabulary acquisition has become the focus of research in the field of second language acquisition.Although many foreign experiments and tests indeed give us some valuable pedagogical implications,there are great differences between our mainland and foreign countries in terms of both English teaching environment and students’ background.Thus,it is necessary to conduct an experiment to study incidental vocabulary acquisition according to the domestic students’ characteristics.The present study was carried out to investigate the effects of different reading tasks on enhancing high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention.The significance of this study was that it could provide some insights into different reading tasks,enrich the research in the field of incidental vocabulary acquisition,and offer valuable pedagogical suggestions to high school students,English teachers,as well as compilers of English textbooks.There are two research questions:1)What effect do different reading tasks have on high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition?2)What effect do different reading tasks have on high school students’ incidental vocabulary retention?To be more specific,the first research questions consists of two parts,and they are:What effect do different reading tasks have on receptive vocabulary knowledge in acquisition?And what effect do different reading tasks have on productive vocabulary knowledge in acquisition?Similarly,the second research question can also be divided into two parts:What effect do different reading tasks have on receptive vocabulary knowledge in retention?And what effect do different reading tasks have on productive vocabulary knowledge in retention?The participants in this study were fifty-two students who are freshmen in a senior high school in Qidong,Jiangsu Province,China.They were all from the same class,of which twenty-six were boys and twenty-eight were girls.These participants were randomly divided into three groups to receive different reading tasks:a group of answering questions based on the passage,a group of translating sentences and a group of writing a composition with target words to summarize the whole passage after reading it.The number of participants of each group was seventeen,eighteen and seventeen,respectively.Before the treatment,a pre-test was carried out to adjust the content of reading materials according to students’ average language proficiency and ten target words were chosen for the tests of vocabulary acquisition and retention.The data were collected by an immediate vocabulary test and a delayed test.both of which consisted of an English-to-Chinese word translation test,a sentence production test,a Chinese-to-English word translation test and a gap-fill test.The major findings yielded from this study are as followsFirstly,in the short term,students can acquire vocabulary incidentally through different reading tasks.Compared with the other two reading tasks,the reading task of translating sentences was more beneficial to students to acquire receptive knowledge.However,as for the productive vocabulary knowledge,especially in context.the reading task of writing a composition to summarize the whole passage with target words was most effective.For one thing,the effectiveness of the task of translating sentences in acquiring receptive vocabulary knowledge can be attributed to the noticing hypothesis.The participants in the group of translating sentences paid more attention to the Chinese meanings and collocation of the target words when they were completing their task.And the test of receptive vocabulary knowledge needed participants to master this kind of knowledge.For another,as for the validity of the task of writing a composition,the involvement load hypothesis may account for this finding.This task needed the most involvement components which may facilitate the acquisition of productive vocabulary knowledge in context,such as need,search,and evaluation.Secondly,in the long term,the reading task of translating sentences and writing a composition still took an advantage in the retention test of receptive vocabulary in isolation and productive vocabulary in context,respectively.Although due to the loss of memory,the effectiveness of sentence translation task in the retention test of vocabulary knowledge in context no longer exists.There are some reasons accounting for this phenomenon.On the one hand,because of the close relation between the sentence translation task and the test of receptive vocabulary knowledge in isolation,it is relatively easy to remember these target words’ Chinese meanings and hard to forget.On the other hand,as for the task of writing a composition,the involvement load hypothesis still works at this stage.Different levels of processing lead to different memory trace.The processing of writing a composition involves more analysis,comparison and elaboration,and it is hard to forget the vocabulary knowledge that have been acquired.Pedagogical implications from the study are as follows:Firstly,English teachers should learn to combine the explicit teaching with students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition to make students acquire vocabulary knowledge more effectively.Secondly.teachers should help their students to review the new vocabulary knowledge that they have acquired incidentally from the reading material in time to reduce memory loss.Thirdly,compilers of English textbooks and English teachers should design or choose the type of reading tasks appropriately according to the actual needs of English teaching.