A Study On The Middle School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In The Teaching Of Reading Text With Lead-in Skills

Vocabulary acquisition plays a critical role in learning a second language. How vocabulary is acquired and what the most effective means is to promote effective acquisition have been worthwhile lines of investigations in the field of SLA. As one of the vocabulary learning methods, incidental vocabulary acquisition has become a specifically popular subject. Many researches have proved that incidental vocabulary acquisition can occur through extensive reading. However, teaching reading text with lead-in skills is not favored as much as written input. So the current study chooses lead-in skills applied to reading teaching as the topic to study, owing primarily to an increasing interest in communicative approach to language learning and the role of interaction in language acquisition.The purpose of this experimental study is to examine the effect of teaching reading text with various lead-in activities on the acquisition of English vocabulary in Chinese middle school. Based on the Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Involvement Load Hypothesis for L2 vocabulary learning proposed by Laufer & Hulstijn (2001) and Gardner' Motivation Theory, in my study, two reading teaching modes (teaching reading in traditional way and teaching reading text with lead-in skills) will be compared as to the effectiveness on the vocabulary acquisition. A total of 102 students from Nanping Senior Middle School participated in the study. They are divided into two experimental groups and taught in two different reading teaching modes. In the process of the study, an interview and a questionnaire are undertaken. The experiment also results from both pre-test and post-test. All of the investigations reveal that students can acquire vocabulary in various lead-in activities which support the Input Hypothesis (i.e. the more input, the more acquisition), the Involvement Load Hypothesis (i.e. the greater the involvement load, the better the retention) and Motivation Theory as well. The second finding is that while training the students' reading abilities, the task of reading teaching after lead-in activities also affects vocabulary acquisition to a certain degree.It is hoped that the current research may pave the way for the future studies of incidental vocabulary acquisition. In addition, the results tend to provide theoretical and practical values for reading and vocabulary teaching in China.