A Qualitative Study On Semantic Processing In Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

The study intends to explore the mental activities of the readers in processing the semantic information of the new words and the cognitive mechanism in incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. The three research questions are addressed in the study: 1) Do readers engage in semantic processing when they encounter unfamiliar words in reading? 2) If so, what kinds of strategies do they employ in this semantic processing? 3) How do the learners integrate the semantic information they have processed into the semantic structure of their mental lexicon?22 EFL learners participated in the study. Before the experiment they took a questionnaire on topic familiarity and the target words pretest. In the experiment, they were required to read two reading passages and finished the reading comprehension tasks. After that they completed target words posttest and did retrospective think-aloud immediately. A month later, they took the target words posttest again.T-tests were conducted to examine the difference of topic familiarity and the acquisition of target words in two reading passage and vocabulary gain from pretest to posttest 1 and 2. Correlation analysis was employed to investigate the relationship between semantic processing strategies employed and the acquisition of target words in two posttests. And protocols were classified and analyzed to describe semantic processing and the integration of the target words in IVA. The analyses of the results revealed that 1) readers engaged in semantic processing when they encounter unfamiliar words in reading; 2) readers mainly employed five types of strategies in semantic processing of the words: by L1; by L2; by schema/background knowledge; by contextual clues and by mental images; 3) background knowledge plays a robust role in word integration; 4) in the process of incidental vocabulary acquisition, the subjects tend to allocate more attention to the word which seems familiar to them and they guess, confirm or reject their predictions of the word meaning in reading; 5)the learners' reading habits influence acquisition.In the end, theoretical and pedagogical implications and limitations of the present study are discussed and suggestions for further study are also given.