The Effects Of Glosses On College Non-English Majors' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

In the field of second language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition has been in the ascendant since 1980s. As a fundamental component of language, vocabulary is essential to English language learning. However, learners are often impeded by a large number of unfamiliar words during language acquisition. It is publicly recognized that vocabulary can be acquired incidentally through reading. Glosses have been adopted as a common approach to help learners to learn new words effectively during reading process. Plenty of studies have proved the positive effects of vocabulary glosses in reinforcing incidental vocabulary learning through reading. So the question in vocabulary study now has shifted from whether or not glosses are helpful for vocabulary learning to which gloss type is most effective. Based on the input hypothesis and the depth of processing theory, the current study aims to investigate and compare the effects of three types of L1 glosses, i.e. single glosses, multiple-choice glosses, and single glosses plus English example sentences, on learners'incidental vocabulary learning through reading to see which types of glosses is more effective. Three classes of college non-English-major freshmen participating in this study were assigned to three groups under three glossing conditions:single gloss, multiple-choice gloss, and single gloss plus example sentence. In order to further investigate the performances of the high proficiency and low proficiency subjects, each group was subdivided into high proficiency and low proficiency subgroups based on students' English proficiency level. After a pretest and a reading task, subjects were given an immediate vocabulary test and two delayed vocabulary posttests.The results firstly indicated that (a) on the whole, subjects in the multiple-choice group performed significantly better than those in the other two groups and there is no significant difference between the single gloss group and the single gloss plus example sentence group (b) three types of glosses have different effects on learners of different proficiency levels and subjects with high proficiency level can take significantly better advantage of multiple-choice gloss to learn more unknown words than those with low proficiency level. Furthermore, based on two-week period of vocabulary retention, a tendency was found that a sharp decrease of retention took place between the immediate and the first delayed vocabulary recall posttest and slowed down after that in three groups. These findings may contribute to vocabulary instruction, extracurricular reading and material development.