A Study Of English Newspaper Reading Relevant To Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary plays a crucial role in learning of a foreign language.Students are required to have a vocabulary of 3500 words instead of 2,000 words after graduating from high school by the New English Curriculum Standards(NECS).There is no doubt that the increase of vocabulary will impose a new challenge on English learners as well as the teachers in high school.Traditional vocabulary teaching seems not to meet the demands of NECS.English newspapers,vivid and updated,are by all means indispensable parts of curriculum resources.To meet the demands of NECS,the author introduces English newspapers into senior middle school EFL classroom as a supplement to the English textbooks and gets students to achieve incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA) through reading English newspapers.The first hypothesis presented by the author is that English newspapers meet the needs of the senior middle schoo 1 students for better IVA than traditional reading materials and it is testified to be true by using the qualitative research method,such as,interviews and questionnaires.To test the hypothesis,21^st Century—School Edition(21cSE) is chosen as the research text in the first month of the experiment;a total of 100 students participate in the experiment.The effect is not as obvious as expected.The author presents the second hypothesis that the teacher's instructive intervention facilitates IVA through newspapers reading.The present thesis aims to verify the hypothesis by experiment.50 students in the experimental class(EC) are conducted to read English newspapers during three months' instructive intervention,and 50 in the control class(CC) use the same reading materials without the teacher's intervention.The results show that the students in the EC achieve significantly better IVA than those in the CC.Based on the theories or hypothesis of IVA, some strategies are adopted to instruct the students in the EC in the experiment.This research reveals that newspaper reading is closely related with IVA,English newspapers meet the students' needs for better IVA than traditional reading materials,and that the teacher's instructive intervention facilitates IVA through newspaper reading.