A Study On Chinese Non-English Majors' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

More attention has been paid to vocabulary acquisition in second language acquisition after long time neglect though it is still far from clear how learners acquire vocabulary or how it can be taught. The process of incidental acquisition is slow and also there is no way to predict which words will be acquired, when or to what extent. Researches in incidental vocabulary acquisition are prevalent abroad. However in China, little attention is paid to incidental vocabulary acquisition. In this paper, the author designed different reading tasks according to different reading purposes to explore the incidental vocabulary acquisition of Chinese L2 learners, non-English majors. It is an empirical study carried out in Shaanxi Normal University. The writer aims to explore the following questions:Q1:Is incidental vocabulary acquisition possible for the Chinese non-English majors in their learning?Q2:Do different reading tasks and materials affect the process of incidental vocabulary acquisition?Q3:Is vocabulary size as a variable affecting vocabulary acquisition between the subjects of large and small vocabulary size in the different groups?Q4:Do learning strategies have an impact on incidental vocabulary acquisition?Q5:Under what conditions do Chinese L2 learners start to learn English words incidentally?The learners'incidental vocabulary acquisition results and retentions are probed in different ways, such as one experiment, two tests and two surveys. The students can be classified by two groups according to the different reading tasks. One group is to read and then answer the following questions, the other is to read and use the target words to make original sentences. The immediate and delayed tests are used to check the incidental vocabulary acquisition gains and retentions. Two questionnaires are used one is learning strategy questionnaire, the other is vocabulary size questionnaire to differentiate the learners'vocabulary size and proficiency. The experiment, two tests and two surveys are carried out in two balanced classes from College of Food Engineering and Nutritional Science of Shaanxi Normal University, non-English majors. The two classes were balanced on the number of students, the ratio of learners with large vocabulary and with small vocabulary and the ratio of different learning strategy users.After the data collection, the writer uses the statistic tool SPSS version 13.0 to analyze the data. From the description of statistical data, such as Standard Deviation and Mean, we get a general idea of how well the students perform the incidental vocabulary acquisition gains and retentions. Analyzing the independent T-test, the writer gets to know whether the group different in incidental vocabulary acquisition gains and retentions are important or not. With the statistical methods, we come to the conclusions. The present study has great theoretical and practical importance in the English teaching and learning. It is important for the students to do more extensive reading and to enlarge their vocabulary, it is also better for the teachers to lead students in their reading tasks in order to improve students'incidental vocabulary acquisition gains and retentions ability.