A Study On The Application Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition On Foreign English Teaching Of High Schools

Vocabulary is an important part in English learning . As for the high school learners ,enlarging the vocabulary size is an important way to improve their English ability .With the development of new course reform of high school teaching ,the New National Criterion for English Course has raised the requirement of vocabulary ,bringing a greater task for English teachers .English teachers have been searching for an efficient way to teach words in which students can grasp different usages of words and use the words in real communication .However,English teachers are encountering a dilemma :on the one hand ,they want to help enlarge the students'vocabulary ;On the other hand ,they can't teach new words through the whole class.Therefore,it is quite necessary to find out an effective way of teaching vocabulary to improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning and memory .Nowadays, what is good for the learners is that they can obtain a large quantity of various English reading materials on the internet,newspapers and magazines. They can acquire vocabulary through extensive reading incidentally ,which in turn makes incidental vocabulary acquisition a necessary part for enlarging their vocabulary.Nevertheless ,a lot of researches home and abroad show that extensive reading without direction results in a small quantity of words acquisition. Therefore ,English teachers should provide various and efficient ways of reading to the students and instruct them how to read as well as keeping words teaching as a necessary part . This thesis deals with the effects of different reading approaches on incidental vocabulary acquisition .The thesis consists of four parts :the first part introduces the definition of incidental vocabulary acquisition and the literature review of relative theories . Incidental vocabulary acquisition has been a subject of great interest so far .Many researcher are interested in it and have done many researches.However , there are very few based on high school students .The second part is a summary of the former empirical researches on incidental vocabulary acquisition .The author summarizes some approaches to promoting incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading in the former researches ,four of which are chosen to do the following research in high school and compared to the traditional reading approach.The third and main part is a study of incidental vocabulary acquisition in high school English teaching of reading.Some practical reading methods are used to find out the results :multiple-choice glosses to the target words, blank-filling with the target words ,retelling the text with the target words and making up sentences with the target words .The results show that the first three tasks can have a good effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition .Though making up sentences with the target words and traditional reading approach can promote incidental vocabulary acquisition in a way,the results are not very good in comparison .The fourth part is the reflection of the study and some advice has been raised for teaching of reading .The author has put forward some practical advice on reading teaching according to the research results of the five approaches and some shortcomings are talked about as well .Owing to the author's limited research level ,many problems about the incidental vocabulary acquisition remain to be proved and discussed .