An Empirical Research Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through College English Reading

In recent years, the study of second language vocabulary acquisition becomes an increasingly interesting topic for theorists, curriculum designers, teachers and researchers (Coady,1997). The importance of reading for second language learners' lexical development is generally acknowledged and it has gained acceptance that learners can gain a significant amount of unfamiliar vocabularies incidentally while reading passages.Incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading has been recommended by western second language educators (Knight,1994; Schmidt,1994; Watanabe,1997; Joe,1998; Ellis,1999; Hulstijn & Laufer,2001; Swanborn & Glopper,2002) to be one of the most effective and pedagogically efficient approaches. However, few studies have been done to investigate such an approach in the Chinese context. Therefore, this research is to explore the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition with Chinese university learners by both quantitative approach and qualitative approach. The subjects participating in this experiment are selected from two second-year classes of intermediate level in Shenyang Normal University.Based on Depth of Processing and Involvement Load Hypothesis, the main findings show that learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading, and the learner's proficiency level has positive effect on incidental vocabulary gains and retentions. Vocabulary frequency correlates significantly with learning:learners who read the text with high vocabulary frequency give better performance than learners who read the text with low vocabulary frequency. The reading texts with annotation can better facilitate the subjects'incidental vocabulary acquisition than those with no annotation, and multiple-choice annotation proves to be more effective than single annotation. The interactive influence of annotation ways and vocabulary frequency indicates that the reading text with high vocabulary frequency and multiple-choice annotation can influnence incidental vocabulary acquisition most effectively. Moreover, incidental vocabulary acquisition can help learners' long-term memory. The results of this paper have great practical implications for current vocabulary teaching and learning:(1) learners can get an effective way to enlarge their vocabulary; (2) language teachers should choose materials with multiple-choice annotation and high vocabulary frequency for classroom or extracurricular reading; (3) there appears a reference for reading material designers to design suitable reading texts and make their materials more helpful to learners.The present research attempts to make some contribution to incidental vocabulary acquisition. It is hoped that the investigation may provide some insights into second language vocabulary teaching and learning, thereby assisting the development of vocabulary acquisition in an incidental setting.