A Comparison Study Of Non-English Majors’Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

It is increasingly aware that vocabulary is an essential part of language learning. To make vocabulary learning more efficient, researchers and teachers have conducted a large number of empirical studies on employment of vocabulary learning strategies. Amongst those vocabulary strategies, incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) is drawing more and more attention. IVA (learning vocabulary incidentally), contrary to intentional vocabulary acquisition, refers to when the students do the task, for example reading a passage, they intent to comprehend the passage, not the new vocabulary but they acquire the new words incidentally. However, many researches focus on the influence of reading tasks and input style on IVA effect. The relationship between gender, proficiency and IVA effect is generally ignored. Identifying the relationship can help teachers make more specific strategy employment instructions; meanwhile, language learners can choose suitable strategies to improve their vocabulary learning efficiency.In the current study,100non-English freshmen from Liao Ning Technology University were chosen as subjects. Data was collected through a questionnaire and two test papers. The questionnaire used in this study was partially adopted from Gu and Hu’s study (2003) and the rest was designed by the researcher. Two test papers (immediate test paper and delayed test paper) show the subjects’retention right after the experiment and their retention one week after the experiment. The data collected from this experiment was analyzed by SPSS11.5.The present study has yielded the following important findings. First, although most EFL learners have contextual guessing awareness, they do not consider it as an important vocabulary strategy, while memorizing strategy is more employed; second, female group and high-score group are proved to be better contextual guessing strategy employers; third, there is some relationship between gender, proficiency and IVA effect, to be specific, female and high-proficiency learners can gain higher vocabulary retention through IVA.In the last section, pedagogical implications and limitations of this study are discussed. Finally suggestions for future researches are proposed.