A Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition From Extensive Reading In High School Level

Applying the recent theory and approach on vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary test, this research focuses on the incidental vocabulary acquisition of middle school students through extensive reading. The main parts of the research include a one-year test on extensive reading, a vocabulary test that covers meaning, collocation and syntax in terms of productive and receptive competence respectively, and analyses of the test data. It is intended to find out some rule about incidental vocabulary acquisition, and further to drop some hints on vocabulary teaching and learning under the New Curriculum for Senior School English.L2 vocabulary acquisition can be assessed in terms of lexical competence and word knowledge. Incidental learning and intended learning are distinguished as two major approaches to L2 vocabulary acquisition, according to different processing efforts on the new words. Up till now, large amounts of research have confirmed that extensive reading is an effective way to enlarge the learner's vocabulary size and promote his vocabulary acquisition. But how do beginners acquire L2 vocabulary through incidental learning? Is there any rule governing the acquisition? To find out the answer, the research proposes two assumptions: that learners are supposed to acquire word knowledge through extensive reading, and that learners are supposed to develop lexical competence through extensive reading. These assumptions are both confirmed by the test results. It is revealed that on the word knowledge acquisition, learners tend to acquire meaning first, then collocation and syntax; on the lexical competence, learners tend to learn more receptive words than productive ones, as they are inclined to recognize, rather than spell out the word; on the correlation of word knowledge and lexical competence, mastery of meaning and collocation is the most significantly correlated, while mastery of receptive words and productive words the least significantly correlated. The paper stresses that the development of word knowledge is correlated to that of lexical competence and...