A Study Of The Effect Of Reading Purposes On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In L2 Reading

Studies have shown that wide reading contributes to incidental vocabulary acquisition. In the recent two decades, research at home and abroad has been conducted to examine several factors that may influence incidental vocabulary acquisition during second language (L2) reading. However, in the review of the studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition, the author found that a potential factor-the reading purpose-has been rarely explored in the studies available. As different reading purposes tend to involve different level of text information processing and varying the reading purpose may lead to different level of incidental vocabulary acquisition, the author considered it necessary to probe the relationship between the reading purpose and incidental vocabulary acquisition.In the study, two reading purposes were mainly focused on: one was "read to learn about the topic of a text" and the other was "read for text comprehension", as they are the most common purposes that learners hold in L2 reading class. The overall objective of this study was to examine how reading a text with these two imposed purposes might affect incidental word acquisition in L2 reading through empirical data.Four questions were posed in this study: 1. Are Chinese college English learners able to incidentally acquire unknown words through L2 reading? 2. Do different reading purposes affect college English learners'incidental vocabulary acquisition in L2 reading? 3. What is the effect of different reading purposes on incidental vocabulary acquisition of the higher reading ability learners and the lower ability ones? 4. Do different reading purposes affect the retention of the incidentally acquired words?As for the above questions, the results provided by the empirical study manifested the following: 1. All the subjects could incidentally acquire a certain number of unknown words through reading with the two reading purposes. 2. Both the higher reading ability subjects and the lower reading ability ones incidentally acquired relatively more unknown words with the purpose of reading for text comprehension than with the purpose of reading to learn about the topic. 3. The higher reading ability subjects acquired significantly more unknown words in the "read for text comprehension" condition than in the "read to learn about the topic" condition and the difference was significant at the .05 level; for the lower ability subjects, they also gained comparatively more unknown words with the purpose of reading for text comprehension than with the other purpose but the difference failed to reach significant difference; with either of the two reading purposes, the higher reading ability subjects acquired relatively more unknown words than the lower reading ability subjects; in the "read to learn about the topic" condition there was a little gap between the higher reading ability subjects and the lower ability ones in the incidental word gains, the greater gap between them occurred in the"read for text comprehension" condition and the difference was significant at the .05 level, the greatest gap occurred when the former in the "read for text comprehension" condition and the latter in the "read to learn about the topic" condition and the difference between them was significant at the .05 level. 4. After 6 weeks, with the two purposes, both the higher reading ability subjects and the lower ability ones lost a certain number of the incidentally gained words and the dropping rate of the incidentally gained words was lower in the "read to learn about the topic" condition; the higher reading ability subjects retained relatively more incidentally gained words with the purpose of reading for text comprehension than with the purpose of reading to learn about the topic; for the lower ability subjects, they retained comparatively more the incidentally gained words in the "read to learn about the topic" condition. For the results of the incidental word acquisition, possible causes were speculated from two perspectives: one was the different levels of text inf...