| China has the largest population of high school students who learn English as foreign language. Vocabulary is very important for them. Although they take much pain in memorizing the words, the outcome is not ideal as they expect. In NMET, there is a trend that reading is more and more difficult and more unknown words appear in reading. Traditional way of learning words: rote memory is outdated. Incidental vocabulary acquisition holds that the students can acquire certain new words by extensive reading, which provides another simple way to solve the problem of vocabulary. So it is necessary to carry out an experiment on the incidental vocabulary acquisition for high school students.The writer tries to answer the following research questions:1. Can high school English learners acquire the incidental vocabulary?2. Does high school English learners'vocabulary size have any effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition?3. Do the word attack strategies have any influence on high school English learners'incidental vocabulary acquisition?The participants in this study are from two parallel intact classes of Grade two in an ordinary high school in Chongqing. There are 75 students in the control class and 74 students in the experimental class. In order to make sure the participants suitable for the study, the writer excludes the top students and the lowest students according to the result of the vocabulary level test. The remaining 66 students in each class are taken as the samples for the study. And the students in both control class and experimental class are further divided into two groups: the group with large vocabulary and the group with small vocabulary. The students also answer a pre-questionnaire about the word attack strategies. The SPSS software processes the data and shows there isn't any significant difference. The participants have a pre-test of incidental vocabulary acquisition which includes an immediate test and a delayed test. Two months later, a post-questionnaire and an interview are done and a post-test of incidental vocabulary acquisition is also carried out to test whether there is any change for the students in the experimental class. The conclusion from the data and analysis is made:1.High school English learners can acquire the incidental vocabulary although their vocabulary is limited, on the condition that the reading material is well chosen, that is to say, the coverage of unknown words are less than 5% and the reading materials are something familiar to them.2. High school English learners'vocabulary size has influence on their incidental vocabulary acquisition. The larger the vocabulary size, the more incidental vocabulary acquisition. Too small vocabulary size means little or no incidental vocabulary acquisition.3. The word attack strategies can influence high school English learners'incidental vocabulary acquisition. The students with large vocabulary gain more from word attack strategies, which leads to more and better incidental vocabulary acquisition. But for the students with small vocabulary, the effect is not so distinct.The study is of theoretic and practical value for English teaching and learning. Its implication for the teachers is that teachers should realize the importance of incidental vocabulary acquisition and put emphasis on the extensive reading instead of just letting the students learn the limited words listed in the course book. And teachers also should cultivate the students'ability to guess the meaning of unknown words. And for the learner, they should change the way of learning words from rote memory to extensive reading. From the phenomenon that the students can acquire word incidentally if the reading materials are well chosen and that the retention remains low just for one exposure, the material writers should see to it that the reading materials are appropriate for the students, in difficulty level, topic, and the choice of new words and the rate of reappearance of new words.
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