A Study On The Effects Of Different Tasks On Non-english Majors’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading

Vocabulary is of vital importance to language. In mother-tongue setting,children can grasp words without much difficulty, while in second language learningenvironment vocabulary learning becomes a big headache. Therefore, many appliedlinguists wonder how second language learners can acquire vocabulary incidentallylike native speakers.The researcher used non-English majors as subjects and tried to find outwhether incidental vocabulary acquisition is an effective way to enlarge non-Englishmajors’ vocabulary size and what kind of tasks in reading is better for students’incidental vocabulary acquisition.Three classes’ students were chosen as the subjects. They were asked to dothree tasks after reading. These three tasks are with different involvement load. Thenan immediate test and a delayed test were carried out to check students’ incidentalacquisition of target words. The results showed that different tasks may have differenteffect on students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition. The higher the task involvementload is, the better the vocabulary acquisition is. The study also finds that the readingwith glosses may help the incidental vocabulary acquisition.