An Empirical Study Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Narrow Reading To Business English Reading Teaching

This paper applies narrow reading hypothesis to business English reading to explore the effect of incidental vocabulary acquisition (Abbreviated as IVA in the following passage) in business English reading, detects into the relationship between narrow reading and IVA and studies on the IVA effect of learners with different vocabulary levels. The author hopes to provide some implications on effectively acquiring vocabulary incidentally through narrow reading for L2learners especially for language learners majoring in business English.Most studies on narrow reading and IVA are on influence of background knowledge, lexical and discourse familiarity to IVA effect, but few studies are carried out on Chinese college students especially on those students majoring business English. Thus we design this reading experiment on the narrow reading hypothesis, hoping to find out whether Chinese college students majoring in business English can better acquire vocabulary through narrow reading. The questions are as follows:(1) Is there any relationship between business English majors’ vocabulary sizes and IVA?(2) Can business English majors get better IVA in narrow reading than those in general reading after being given the same business English reading materials?(3) After being trained by narrow reading approach, can business English majors employ incidentally acquired words to read articles of the same pattern and achieve better reading effect?The study consists of vocabulary tests, a vocabulary test for business English, two reading tests and a face-to-face interview. Fifty-six sophomores in two classes(classes one and two) are selected from four classes majoring in business English of Zhuzhou Teachers College to attend in the whole process of the experiment, the other two(classes three and four) only join in vocabulary test for business English which is used to determine the15target words. The reading materials are from their texts and exercise books-Selected Readings On International Business&Economics From Western Journals. All the data are analyzed by the software SPSS.The results obtained in this thesis suggest that IVA effect of business English majors with larger vocabulary sizes is not as good as that of those with smaller ones. The results also suggest that in narrow reading, core vocabulary relating to the theme can help business English majors acquire vocabulary incidentally in a better way. Having been trained in the way of narrow reading, all the subjects’business English reading skills have been obviously improved, and their reading interests and self-confidence are enhanced.Basing on the results, implications to teachers, learners and textbook compilers in business English reading are given respectively. In business English reading, teachers are expected to choose suitable materials to reduce disturbance of being lack of background knowledge. At the same time, teachers should pay more attention to the differences of the individual students, distribute different materials to different students and control the degree of "input" so that they can effectively acquire vocabulary incidentally. As to those students, they can do more business English reading besides reading in class. And as to textbook compilers, they might put the theme-related business English reading materials together according to vocabulary sizes of the passages and provide more similar materials for students’reading out of class.