The Incidental Acquisition Of Active And Passive Vocabulary Through Repeated Reading And Its Cognitive Mechanism:Evidence From Eye Movements

Vocabulary is an extremely important element for language learners.Vocabulary knowledge is not a non-or-all experience,but a continuous process of development beginning with the unfamiliarity with a word and ending with the ability to use the word correctly and freely.This view is called the continuum of vocabulary knowledge.Based on the continuum theory,Laufer(1998)divided vocabulary into passive vocabulary,controlled active vocabulary and free active vocabulary.The passive vocabulary refers to the words learners can understand the core meanings but cannot use;the controlled active vocabulary refers to the words learners can use when prompted by a task while the free active vocabulary refers to the words learners can use correctly at their free wills,without any specific prompts.As an effective way to acquire vocabulary,incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)means language learners acquire some new words by chance when they are engaged in other meaningful learning activities or focus on other learning tasks,therefore many researchers carried out empirical studies on IVA.In most of the previous approaches to IVA,the classification of receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge was adopted to evaluate the vocabulary acquisition results.However,Read(2004)pointed out that the distinction between receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge was too vague and this dichotomy had so large a span that a more detailed assessment is needed to evaluate the IVA results.The current study,therefore,attempted1 to explore the incidental acquisition of passive,controlled active and free active vocabulary for Chinese middle school English learners(English as a foreign language,EFL)from the perspective of Laufer’s theory.More specifically,this study was to explore whether EFL learners in middle schools could acquire passive,controlled active and free active vocabulary in the continuum through repeated reading.If they could acquire these three types of vocabulary at the same time and differentially,there must be differences in attention allocation in the vocabulary processing.In view of this,through the accurate eye-tracking paradigm,this study compared the eye movement patterns in the processing of three types of vocabulary.More specifically,by observing the high school graduates with the same vocabulary size,the study tried to probe into the eye movement patterns of the processing of three types of vocabulary after the repeated reading(8 times).And the cognitive mechanism of IVA would be clarified by analyzing the patterns of processing and the features of the words in the relevant context.The results first showed that participants acquired 6 passive vocabulary,4 controlled active vocabulary and 2 free active vocabulary after repeated reading of the passage.The second was that the participants’ familiarity with target words was significantly improved and the load of cognitive processing decreased robustly after repeated reading.However,by comparing the eye movement parameters in the processing of the three types of vocabulary,the results further showed that there was no significant effect in the early stage of lexical processing.But the significant effect of later processing could be clearly reflected in run count,saccade amplitude and other eye movement indicators.This result indicated that the word form learning was similar in all the continuum of vocabulary acquisition,but the construction of semantic and syntactic representation was drastically different during the 8 times of repeated reading.The current study revealed that the cognitive processing of different types of vocabulary could be determined by the familiarity and contextual information of target words,as well as the interest and the focus of attention learners applied due to the contextual factors.The results could also provide some implications for the English vocabulary teaching in middle schools.