Improve Junior Students' Vocabulary Learning Through Comprehensible Reading Input

Lexical ability is one of the most important elements in the learners'language proficiency. According to The English Curriculum Standard (2002), students need to learn about 1500-1600 words as well as 200-300 useful expressions in junior school. How to enlarge the vocabulary is becoming a more and more urgent task for both middle school students and teachers. And enough vocabulary is one of the important elements to improve students'ability of using language.The way L2 vocabulary is presented influences the use of modes of vocabulary learning. Strands of research on this topic have fallen into the distinction of three pairs of categories. One of the pairs is direct and indirect learning. Indirect learning is based on Krashen's input theory. And the"i+1"theory is the essence of Krashen's input hypothesis. In Krashen's view, the most fundamental approach for a learner to acquire a language is to understand the language input."i"represents the learner's current level;"1"refers to the language a little beyond the learner's current level. Only when the learner understands the comprehensive input"i+1", and some affective factors are taken in the input, language acquisition can take place.This study is mainly based on the second language input theory of comprehensible input. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of comprehensible reading input on junior students'vocabulary learning, especially on their vocabulary size. The study was carried out in two junior classes. One is the experimental class, and the other is the control class. In the experimental class, the students have comprehensible reading input by reading 21st Century Teens (junior edition).The research instruments are a questionnaire, an interview, and students'self-reports, vocabulary size pretest and posttest, and SPSS 13.0 for windows. The results of the study show that students enlarge their vocabulary size by comprehensible reading input and the quantity of their comprehensible reading input is positively correlated with the increase of their vocabulary size.