The Effect Of Different Glosses On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading For Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is the basic component of sentence and composition. Since we lack the environment of listening and speaking in China, reading comprehension is the most effective and convenient way to improve vocabulary level and glosses can facilitate reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition. In recent years, the study of incidental acquisition is in an endless stream, but empirical researches are few, and researches on the middle school students are fewer. Based on the study of Noticing Hypothesis, Depth of Processing Hypothesis and Involvement Load Hypothesis, this paper aims to explore whether senior middle school students with a vocabulary size about 2000-3000 can acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading, and which kind of gloss is the most effective to help promoting vocabulary incidental acquisition.The present study chooses two classes of Senior Three students 103 as the subjects, and they were required to do the reading test. During the experiment, the subjects were divided into four groups, each group read the same text with different word glosses (no gloss, Chinese single gloss, English single gloss, Chinese multiple-choice gloss), and received immediate vocabulary test and vocabulary retention test. Then, the researcher uses SPSS 14.0 --- educational software for data statistics and analysis.By analyzing the collected data, the results show that: 1) Learners with a vocabulary size about 2000-3000 can acquire vocabulary incidentally through reading; 2) In reading process, offering glosses to new words in reading text can facilitate incidental vocabulary acquisition; 3)Different kinds of glosses will result in different effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition, multiple-choice gloss is the most effective in enhancing vocabulary incidental acquisition; 4) There are no significant differences among texts with different gloss conditions in retention effect. The study proved the feasibility of incidental vocabulary acquisition theory again and also provides some guidance for English teachers and English learners to choose suitable reading materials, and therefore improving their English study efficiency. According to the study results, some implications for English education field and book publishing field have been put forward. At last, the researcher gives some advices for future research.