An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Reading Purposes On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Second Language Reading Of Non-English Major College Students

During the past decades, researchers both abroad and home have explored severalfactors that could impact incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) through second language(L2) reading. However, in the literature review, the author finds that reading purpose hasbeen rarely explored in the studies available. The purpose of this study is to investigatehow a learner reading a text with different reading purposes may affect the IVA in L2reading through empirical data. And there are three imposed reading purposes in this study:Purpose1“read for text comprehension”, Purpose2“read to learn about the topic of thetext” and Purpose3“free-reading.In the study, three questions are proposed as follows:⑴Are non-English majorcollege students able to acquire unknown words incidentally through L2reading with thethree reading purposes?⑵Do different reading purposes affect students’ IVA and theretention of those acquired words in L2reading?⑶For different reading ability students,what are the effect of different reading purposes on IVA and the retention of those words?The results of the three questions are manifested as follows:⑴Non-English majorcollege students can acquire a certain number of unknown words incidentally through L2reading with the three different reading purposes.⑵For the three different readingpurposes, the subjects who read with Purpose1gets the highest amount of vocabularyacquisition, and in turn, the subjects who read with Purpose2gets more words than that ofPurpose3relatively. One week later, with the three reading purposes, all the subjects lose acertain number of words; the incidentally gained words are retained best when subjectsreading with Purpose1and the acquired words are lost relatively fewer when subjects readwith Purpose2than those with Purpose3.⑶For the higher reading ability learners, whoread with the Purpose1gets the highest amount of vocabulary acquisition and retention,and the subjects who read with Purpose3gets the lowest amount of vocabulary acquisitionand retention, and there exists significant difference at the.05level for the IVA elicited bythe three different reading purposes. As for the lower reading ability ones, though thesubjects with Purpose1gain more words than the other two reading purposes relatively,the difference doesn’t reach to the significant.