An Empirical Study Of Non-English Major College Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is the foundation of foreign language learning. The learning of vocabulary is the important link, which connects the whole process of English learning. The more vocabulary is mastered, the higher level of English the learner will have. The size of vocabulary directly affects the development of listening, reading, speaking, writing and translating. It is the necessary situation for learners to have a good command of vocabulary. However, in the literature review of English language teaching and learning, the effect of learning vocabulary is not entirely satisfactory for EFL learners. Guiding college students to acquire an adequate vocabulary is often neglected in China. Learners made little progress with a plenty of time and energy. Therefore, guiding and helping college students to acquire an adequate vocabulary is an important task for college English teachers or educators.During the past decades, studies have shown that extensive reading contributes to "incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA)". What then is IVA? It seems no definite answer to this question. But most researchers (Joe, 1998; Wode, 1999; Hulstijn, 2001) do agree that incidental vocabulary learning refers to a by-product of language when learners are doing or trying to finish other language tasks such as reading, listening, speaking, writing, and communicating etc. except for memorizing new words. The term "incidental vocabulary acquisition" used in this paper refers to a by-product of English learning when learners' attention is not on the new words but on the understanding of the passage, and the learners can acquire some new words incidentally when they do some reading comprehension.In the past two decades, research at home and abroad has been conducted to examine several factors that may influence incidental vocabulary acquisition during L2 reading. However, in the review of the studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition, the author found that a potential factor--the reading tasks--has been rarely explored in the studies available.The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of reading tasks with different involvement load on the acquisition of English vocabulary. We also want to check whether topic familiarity can affect the incidental vocabulary acquisition. Based on these reasons, the current empirical study is designed by involvement load hypothesis as a frame. The subjects are 60 non-English majors from Shandong University at Weihai. Each group with 30 subjects is given one task. Task 1 is reading comprehension, task 2 is reading and sentence writing. Each task connects with understanding of target words closely. It takes 15 and 20 minutes separately for the two groups to finish their own tasks. There is an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest one week later. Delayed posttest is the same as the immediate one except the different order of the same target words. Neither of posttests is informed to the subjects in advance.To carry out the present study, the three key research questions are put forward as follows:RQ: 1) Is it possible for the Chinese non-English major college students to acquire English words incidentally through their reading?2) If the answer to the first question is positive, then do different reading tasksaffect the students' incidental vocabulary acquisition? (Task with a higher involvement load is more effective than task with a lower involvement load in incidental vocabulary acquisition.)3) Do such factors as different background knowledge and topic familiarity affectthe retention of vocabulary?After careful experimental design and systematic analysis of the statistic data, we come to the following conclusions:1) The Chinese non-English major college students can acquire new vocabulary incidentally through reading.2) Different reading tasks have different effects on IVA of the Chinese non-English major college students. The group with more workload involved in reading performs better than the one with less workload involved in reading.3) Topic familiarity also has strong effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition. It is obvious that when students read passage familiar to them, they can acquire more vocabulary knowledge incidentally.The present study has great theoretical and practical significance in the English teaching and learning. The findings of the present study not only provides generaly positive support for the involvement load hypothesis, but also provides specific method for foreign or second language educators in teaching vocabulary practically, which vocabulary is processed elaborately in the domain of incidental vocabulary learning, to help learners to learn important and difficult words. Besides, autonomous learners can use the pedagogy to guide themselves to learn new words. That is to say, it will be more effective for students to enlarge their vocabulary by extensive reading rather than through learning wordlists by rote; and in order to improve students" efficiency in IVA gains and retentions, it is better for teachers to guide in their reading tasks and to foster their ability in guessing the meaning of an unknown word from the context.