Incidental Learning Of Vocabulary Through Readng And Word-Foucused Tasks In Classroom Context

There are two popular views on what it means to learn a second language. One view holds that it means months and even years of "intentional" study, involving the deliberate committing to memory of thousands of words and dozens of grammar rules. The other, complementary, view holds that much of the burden of intentional learning can be taken off the shoulders of the language learner by process of "incidental" learning, in particular reading and listening activities. Obviously, incidental learning is quite important in vocabulary acquisition.In the first chapter, the author discusses the aspects of knowing a word, since both of learning processes involve the memory of thousands of words. By answering the questions about words, we have a comprehensive view of word knowledge, the size of vocabulary. In addition, a vocabulary level test is conducted in an engineering college in Shandong Province and we learn that a large number of non-English majors still need to work at the words of 2000 level.The second chapter is about the nature of vocabulary knowledge. To acquire the deep word knowledge will give us insight into reading, the main source of incidental learning, as well as the strategy of guessing during reading. The author discusses the factors that make word confusing and difficult from the perspectives of pronunciations, spellings, synophones, morphology and semantic factors.Then in chapter three, the author makes a distinction between incidental and intentional learning in a broader sense, that is, intentional learning is regarded as designed, planned for, or intended by the teacher or students, while incidental learning as the type of learning that is a byproduct of doing or leaning something else. In a narrow sense or the meaning of incidental and intentional vocabulary learning related to this thesis, intentional vocabulary learning refers to an activity, aimed at committing lexical information to memory, incidental learning on the other hand, does not mean unattended learning, the learners are unaware of the forthcoming vocabulary test, and learning that might occur during tasks in classroom can be considered to be incidental.In the same chapter, the writer introduce input hypothesis to show that, in literature review, it is widely believed that most people enlarge their vocabularies through reading. But in normative English context, vocabulary acquisition-through-reading argument is only a default one. With the counter arguments against the basic assumptions underlying the arguments such as the noticing assumption, the 'guessing ability' assumption, the 'guessing-retention link' assumption, and the 'cumulative gain' assumption, we cannot take the argument for granted, especially in second and instructed language learning context.Then in the following chapter, two experiments were made based on the above discussion and the description of task. The first experiment was to compare the number of words retained after reading activity only with the number of words retained after the task of writing sentences with these same words. The second experiment introduced the task of writing a composition. Both of the results of the two experiments were processed by the software SPSS. The results showed that word-focused tasks were more effective for vocabulary gains in classroom because students involved more mental activities than reading alone in the tasks of writing sentences and composition in the process of output. As discussed above, the process is considered to be incidental learning, for nobody expected the forthcoming tests.The last chapter is about pedagogical implication based on the previous experiments, suggesting a good way to balance the incidental and intentional vocabulary learning in classroom context.