A Study Of Chinese Children’ Incidental Acquisition Of English Vocabulary

In recent years, the study of incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) from readingand other various related studies have been conducted home and abroad, mainlyfocusing on intermediate and advanced learners with prior vocabulary size ofapproximately2000words and these studies are mostly limited to the sole aspect ofword meaning and no delayed retention test as well, and also, so far there have hardlybeen such studies on child learners. While, child second language acquisition (SLA) isof great significance as young kids are in their optimum stage and critical period toacquire a second language, and many invaluable language acquisition phenomena maybe obtained through the observation of the process of child language development.10Chinese child learners participated in this study, and they have learned Englishfor over three years and are able to read Good English, an authentic child’s first readers.Their acquisition of the word spelling, class, meaning and the retention of these aspectsword knowledge were examined immediately after reading and two months laterrespectively, and furthermore, the effect of the illustrations in the reading process wasexplored as well.The instruments of this research are classified into three categories: two groups oflearners, a post-test immediately after the study and a retention-test two months afterthe study with the same mode as the post-test ones. The post-test and retention-test,with the same mode, includes a recognition test of spelling, a recall test of word classand both recognition and recall measures of meaning knowledge. The test battery is acombination of multiple–choice tests and a semi-structured one-to-one interview.Relevant quantitative data collected in the post-test and retention-test was analyzedthrough SPSS17.0. Three research questions of the study are addressed below:1. To what extent does reading Good English with and without illustrations leadto gains in Chinese children’ s knowledge of English words with different frequenciesin terms of spelling, word class, and word meaning? 2. What effects do illustrations have on Chinese children’s IVA through readingGood English with and without illustrations in terms of word knowledge of spelling,word class, and word meaning?3. What a proportion of the incidentally learned words is retained two month later?Through a detailed and thorough study, the major findings can be summarized asfollows:Firstly, the child learners have achieved considerable vocabulary learning throughreading authentic child’s first readers. For learners with illustrations, the overallvocabulary acquisition rate in terms of spelling, word class and word meaning adds upto34%with42%of word form recognition and56%of word meaning recognitionrespectively in particular. Whereas, for learners without illustrations, the overallvocabulary acquisition rate is28%with34%of word form recognition and43%ofword meaning recognition respectively, which is much lower than learners withillustrations.Secondly, learners with illustrations achieved much more acquisition than thosewithout illustrations regarding the aspects of word form recognition, word class recall,word meaning recognition and recall, with word meaning recognition in particular.Thirdly, only the learned words that have been retained may be regarded as thetrue mastery of them, and in this study, the learned words through reading can beretained to some extent, especially for such aspects of word knowledge as meaningrecall and recognition.The findings of the present study are of great significance in terms of Englishteaching of teachers and learning of Chinese children.