The Effect Of Cultural Familiarity And Passage Sight Vocabulary On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Foreign Language Reading

In the current researches on L2 or FL incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) through reading both at home and abroad, there remain gaps in our knowledge about how cultural familiarity affects the process of incidental vocabulary acquisition though L2 or FL reading. The present study systematically followed Pulido's (2004) study with several changes to investigate the effect of cultural familiarity on incidental vocabulary acquisition through FL reading. To accurate the investigation of its effect, passage sight vocabulary was treated as a covariate in the study.This thesis consists of 7 parts. Part 1 mainly gives a brief introduction to the research rationale, aims and significance of the present study. Part 2 focuses on reviewing the related literature of empirical studies investigating the role of background knowledge and passage sight vocabulary on text processing, comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition. Part 3 is a brief introduction to the adapted version of the tentative conceptual framework originally proposed by Dai (2005).Part 4 describes the research design of the present study. An independent sample of 20 participants representing the same background as the fixed participants took part in the pilot study, in which the assumed cultural familiarity of the two chosen passages was justified by the typicality judgment questionnaire. Participants of the present study were 31 sophomore university students of English, representing intermediate English level. The research procedure was (1) 31 participants finished the pretests consisting of (a) background questionnaire; (b) a test of passage sight vocabulary. (2) A week after the pretest, all participants were required to read two passages about wedding ceremony, one set in Chinese culture; the other in Jewish culture. 16 target words (TWs) were chosen evenly from the two passages.(3)After reading, participants were asked to finish the two vocabulary gain tests in the following order (a) the task of translation production; (b) the task of translation recognition.Part 5 and part 6 mainly reports the result and discussion of the present study. All collected data subjected to the analysis of paired-sample T tests, Pearson correlation and ANCOVA by SPSS 13.0. The explanation and discussion of the result were given on the basis the above result and theoretical framework. Part 7 is the conclusion of the present study. The major findings of the study are: (1) Cultural familiarity has a strong effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition through FL reading by intermediate English learners. In both tests of translation production and recognition, participants got obviously higher scores for vocabulary from the culturally familiar passage than that from culturally unfamiliar passage. The result of ANCOVA (in translation production: sig.=0.000; in translation recognition: sig.=0.000) revealed a main effect of cultural familiarity on incidental vocabulary gain in the two tests. Theoretically speaking, for the cultural familiar passage, as information processing was facilitated with the activated cultural-background knowledge, more resources were left available for participants to infer the meaning of the TWs for the lexical development with the help of cultural background knowledge derived from the schemata, which in turn would enable a superior performance of the acquisition of the new words. (2) The overall effect of passage sight vocabulary was proved to be inconsistent. In both tests of translation production and recognition, the Pearson correlations (between passage sight vocabulary and vocabulary gain in the two tasks) for the cultural familiar passage were moderate, significant (in translation production:r=0.413*;in translation recognition: r=0.412*); whereas weak for the culturally unfamiliar passage(in translation production:r= 0.075;in translation recognition: r= 0.143). Besides, the overall effect of passage sight vocabulary was proved to be insignificant by ANCOVA (in translation production: sig.=0.089; in translation recognition: sig.=0.059) in the two tests. The insignificant effect of passage sight vocabulary on incidental acquisition of TWs may have been due to the restrictions on the measurement of passage sight vocabulary. Additionally, other factors may also have influenced the result of vocabulary gain.The findings revealed that a better mastery of the cultural-specific knowledge could facilitate the incidental acquisition of new words though reading, which provides empirical evidence for Schema-theoretic view of learning and the adapted tentative conceptual framework. In addition, the study also shed some light on the L2 vocabulary pedagogy. Several recommendations for the future study were finally addressed.