Effects Of Input Enhancement And Task-based Strategies On Chinese High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In English Reading

Vocabulary learning is the basis of second language learning.As one of the major means for second language learning,incidental vocabulary acquisition refers to the learner’s incidental mastery of new vocabularies while engaging in reading and other tasks.How to master more vocabularies through incidental vocabulary acquisition has become a heated topic for both learners and teachers.In this thesis,the effects of input enhancement and task-based strategy on Chinese senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in English reading are explored.The following questions are answered:(1)Does input enhancement and task-based strategy improve senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in English reading? If yes,which method is better?(2)Does combining input enhancement and task-based strategy have a better effect than using a single method?In this study,quantitative method was adopted through experiment and questionnaire.The participants were 164 Grade One students from a senior high school in Guangzhou City of Guangdong Province and 219 Grade Two students from a senior high school in Sichuan Province.The participants in the two places were divided into four groups,respectively,and each group performed different type of reading task.In Group 1,the target words in the reading material were marked in bold and no annotation was provided,the participants just read the material and did not need to finish a reading comprehension task.In Group 2,the target words in the reading material were not highlighted,and no annotation was provided,the participants should read the material and then finish a reading comprehension task.In Group 3,the target words in the reading material were marked in bold and no annotation was provided,the participants should read the material and then finish a reading comprehension task during.Group 4 was the Control Group for which the target words in the reading material were not highlighted and no annotation was provided,the participants just read the material but did not need to finish a reading comprehension task.After reading,the participants received an immediate test and a delayed test(one week later)on target words to investigate their instant and delayed acquisition of target vocabularies.Finally,111 Guangzhou participants and 187 Sichuan participants finished the questionnaire about their personal English learning situations.The results showed that in terms of immediate and delayed vocabulary tests,there were no significant differences among the four groups in the two places,indicating that input enhancement,task-based strategy,or the combination of input enhancement and task-based strategy has no significant effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition in English reading.The questionnaire results suggested that more than 90% of the participants considered that input enhancement and task-based strategy could help them master new words,and only a small fraction of students thought these two strategies offered no help.When they were asked whether they would review new words after the reading,more than 80% of the students expressed that they would review the new words in the reading task.To sum up,the findings suggest that in order to better promote incidental vocabulary learning of high school students during the English reading process,it is not enough to just rely on bold words or reading comprehension tasks alone.The way of input enhancement and the difficulty of tasks shall be adjusted in order to achieve ideal effects.