The Effect Of Phonological Awareness Level And Phonological Gloss On Incidental Vocabulary Learning Of Chinese College Students In L2Reading

The past two decades witnessed numerous empirical studies at home and abroadexamining the factors that may influence IVL through L2language reading. The focuses ofthese researches include learner-based factors, contextual clues, word features, text-basedtask, and gloss as a way of input enhancement, etc. However, phonological awareness, acritical prerequisite of the development of English literacy (i.e. word recognition and readingability) has received little attention in the field. In addition, almost in all of the previousrelevant studies, word knowledge gain in IVL was assessed in terms of semantic wordknowledge gain only, regardless of phonological and orthographic word knowledge.So, based on the previous research findings and summary of related literatures andtheories, the present study attempted to investigate the effects of phonological awarenesslevel and phonological gloss on IVL through L2reading. A reading comprehensionexperiment of2x2factorial between-subjects design and an interview after word gain testwere conducted. According to the analysis of the data from the quantitative study incombination with interview results, findings of this study were summarized as follows:1. High phonological awareness level facilitates efficient decoding of unfamiliar wordsvia phonological route, the consequence of which is a gain of reliable memory of the word’sletter-sound structure and interconnected phonological, orthographic and semantic knowledgeof the word.2. In L2reading, learners with strong phonological awareness are apt to take advantageof phonological gloss, while learners with poor phonological awareness tend to bypass thephonological gloss due to inadequate phonological competence.Findings above could provide L2language teaching with some implications: first,phonological awareness training in the classroom to improve the students’ phonologicalawareness so as to enhance spelling and reading ability is necessary and also imperious;second, editors in the field of English reading material publishing should provide phonological gloss of potential unfamiliar words in L2reading materials as a way for bothimproving phonological awareness and enhancing IVL achievement as well.