A Longitudinal Study Of Intentional Learning And Incidental Learning

Referring to The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve and the memory schedule by Pimsleur, this paper constructed an experiment lasting nearly one month, and contracted the different effects between Intentional learning (word list) and Incidental learning( reading plus dictionary). The author tried to describe the full process of vocabulary learning, i.e. how the learners overcame the Forgetting Law and achieved the learning goal by repetition. During the experiment, the subjects took eight vocabulary learning courses, and the author tested the results of these eight learning courses respectively by oral test, and collected all the oral materials for a further qualitative analysis, so as to understand the advantages and disadvantages by different learning strategies in different periods of time among the low-level Chinese learners.The results found out that, Intentional learning had a much better effect than the Incidental learning at the very beginning of the learning process, and after several repetitions, it had a good retention. But Intentional learning did not act well in vocabularies that had a complicated and abstract meaning, and it in generative use, and would meet its bottleneck afterwards. Due to a lack of breakthrough and learning intuition, learners may give up.Because of"being incidental", Incidental learning tended to ignore the target words, so it had a bad score at the beginning, and learners always confused the target words. But Incidental learning is a gradual process, which showed its advantages slowly. It not only provided opportunities to learning abstract vocabulary, but helped learners generatively use the words. Moreover, Incidental learning guaranteed the intuition for learning, and enabled the learning have a strong delayed effect.Importantly, Incidental learning required a much more strict working condition. Firstly, it strictly required the reading materials, which should be interesting and familia, and readable in the vocabulary. Secondly, even if the above requirement was met, there is still a possibility that some learners may fail to use it. Therefore, Incidental learning should be carried out carefully according to different people.This study proved that the repetitions after 10min, 1hour and 1day are useful, and a repetition after 5 or 8 hours is necessary according to Pimsleur's memory schedule. The author herself proposed a schedule of vocabulary learning. It tells the different periods of learning process and different learning strategies in these periods. Hopefully, it makes sense.