A Study On The Effects Of Narrow Reading Training On Senior High School Students’ English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is an indispensable component of English learning and teaching,which is regarded as one of the basic elements of language.In senior high school,students often feel frustrated owing to the unsatisfactory vocabulary gains.There still remains the problem that much effort and time is put to recite the words mechanically,however,little vocabulary knowledge is acquired.As for teachers,who still adopt traditional vocabulary teaching mode,spend much time in presenting the meaning and instructing students to do large quantities of drills.The results of traditional English vocabulary teaching mode are still out of satisfaction.In this case,exploring an effective method to promote vocabulary development is indeed necessary.Researchers have been seeking effective ways to address the problems for small vocabulary gains.Narrow reading,put forward by Krashen,has received much attention from L2 researchers owing to its positive effects on lexical development.Narrow reading refers to reading a series of articles within the same topic,a single genre or author,which has been generally verified to boost vocabulary knowledge owing to the repeated encounter on the same topic with theme-specialized words.Therefore,the author intends to apply the narrow reading strategy in current high school English vocabulary class.Input hypothesis,together with schema theory,is served as theoretical foundation to get a more complete picture of the effects of narrow reading strategy on senior students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA).The whole thesis is guided by three research questions:(1)From the perspective of IVA,what effects does narrow reading have on receptive vocabulary knowledge in acquisition?(2)From the perspective of IVA,what effects does narrow reading have on productive vocabulary knowledge in acquisition?(3)What effects does narrow reading have on students’ confidence and interest in vocabulary learning?Adopting a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,this study eventually selects a total of 80 students from two intact Senior one classes in Taiyuan city as research subjects.Before the experiment,each class is randomly arranged to either an experimental class(EC)or a control class(CC).The number of students in EC is 42 students and the CC is made up of 41 students.The author and another teacher test the students’ knowledge on the target words.The students who have preexisting knowledge on target vocabularies are excluded from the experiment.Finally,40 students in EC and CC participate in the experiment respectively.Both groups are exposed to the main texts which include all target words.As for EC,participants are asked to read another four passages within the same topic.Participants in CC are required to read four topically disconnected texts.All participants also complete several reading comprehension items to ensure their active participation.After the treatment,each participant takes four vocabulary tests involving both receptive and productive knowledge.A delayed post-test is followed two weeks later.At the end of the intervention,two participants separately from upper,intermediate and low level in the EC are invited for an interview.The aim of the interview is to further probe into the effect of narrow reading on students’ self-confidence and interest in vocabulary acquisition.The experimental data are analyzed through SPSS 25.0.The findings of this study are in agreement with the theoretical expectations,in that narrow reading has a positive influence on senior high students’ IVA.Following conclusions can be yielded from the process of data analysis.In terms of IVA,narrow reading can promote the acquisition of both receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge.Firstly,narrow reading has been proved efficacious from the perspective of receptive vocabulary acquisition.Compared with CC,EC outperforms in both isolated and contextual tests.Secondly,narrow reading contributes to greater productive vocabulary gains than random reading.Thirdly,narrow reading is beneficial to boost students’ self-confidence and interest in vocabulary learning.The major findings guide us to draw a conclusion that narrow reading is of great referential significance to English vocabulary teaching and learning.Pedagogical implications are illustrated as follows.Firstly,the teachers should integrate narrow reading strategy into English vocabulary teaching and consider it as a supplementary method to facilitate in-class vocabulary teaching.Another implication is that considerable value should be placed on the selection of materials and topics as for teachers.Thirdly,when administrating this new teaching mode,teachers should pay attention to learning problems and requirements that students may face with.What’s more,it is of great importance for teachers to serve as scaffolding to offer students with necessary guidance so that students can make appropriate adjustments and then get improvement gradually.On the whole,this study verifies that narrow reading yields a positive effect on IVA as for senior high school students,aiming to help middle school teachers optimize the presentation of vocabulary classroom.However,due to the limited sample size,relatively short duration and finite theme types,there are still some limitations in this study.Future studies should minimize or eliminate these shortcomings so as to explore in a more scientific way and strive to achieve better research outcomes.