The Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Under The Influence Of Two Types Of Cognitive Styles

The important role of vocabulary in foreign language learning has been widely adopted by the researchers and learners. Furthermore, vocabulary acquisition is currently receiving more attention in foreign language education and research. Among the way of learning new words, incidental vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading is a good way for learners to expand the vocabulary. However, there are many unsolved questions about it, such as richness of contest clues, learning task and so on. There are also many factors that may influence the effort. Among them, the learners'cognitive style is largely neglected.There are 7 chapters in this thesis. Chapter one begins with a brief introduction to the aim and significance of this investigation. In chapter two, we present related survey of study home and abroad. Chapter three is a brief introduction to adapted theoretical framework. Chapter four describes the research design of this research. 100 senor high school students are chosen to take part in the Vocabulary Level Test, Only high level students were left as subjects. Data were collected from 51 students from Xi'an Jin Yuan high school who get high score. The Group Embedded Figure Test was employed to measure participants'cognitive style. The text was chosen from Part A of lesson 3 from New Horizon College English book one as the reading treatment material. Ten words at last were chosen as the target words for incidental acquisition. Three tests were employed to investigate subjects'effect of vocabulary gain in the reading. The data collected were analyzed through SPSS 16.0 to find out the possible relationship between cognitive styles and incidental vocabulary acquisition performance. Chapter five mainly reports the result and discussion of the present study. All collected data subjected to the analysis of paired-sample T tests, Pearson Correlation and ANCOVA by SPSS 16.0. The examination indicated that:1. There is positive correlation between participant'FD/I and their performance in incidental vocabulary acquisition。2. Learners with a higher FI degree are more likely to acquire words incidentally through reading, and the ones of low degree of FI achieve poorly in incidental vocabulary acquisition.3. Different kinds of cognitive styles have different achievements in delay memory test. There is obvious decline among three groups, but FD group forget fewer than FI group on the basis of previous scores.The findings also proved that although field independent subjects perform better than others in immediate-test, they forget more than field dependent on the basis of previous score they got. For those students who with a more field dependent style need extra help when they learn vocabulary incidentally.