Input Hypothesis:the Effect Of Glossing Ways To Incidental Vocabulary Learning In Reading

In the process of second language learning, vocabulary size directly affects the learners’English levels. The students’ language expression in some degree deeply relies on their vocabulary abilities. Most researches indicate second language learners can acquire unknown words through listening, speaking, reading and writing incidentally. Incidental vocabulary learning is an essential way to enlarge the learners vocabulary size. Yet the most widely used way of incidental vocabulary learning at present is to give the unknown words with glossing in various ways in reading learning.Words glossing can not only help the students understand the words correctly (Stein,1993, Hulstijin,1992), but can absorb the students’attention because of its different kinds of glossing forms, which will attribute to word acquisition (Watanabe,1992). Therefore, more and more researchers begin to pay attention to the problem of word acquisition, such as Carter&Mc Carthy (1988), Coady&Huckin (1997) and so on. All of them have done many researches in this field.This study is to explors different glossing forms (including Chinese glossing, English glossing and bilingual glossing) which produce different results to the incidental vocabulary learning and to find out what is beneficial to learn unknown words during reading learning. The study chooses three natural classes as the experimental ones in Lanzhou City University. There are120subjects altogether. Class1with35subjects, as the experimental group1; Class2with42subjects, as the experimental group2; Class3with43subjects, as the experimental group3. The three experimental classes are all tested the2,000-3,000word test (that is the pretest). The reading experiments last for about ten weeks. The quantitative analysis includes an English pretest paper, nine reading passages and eighteen vocabulary tests. Another nature analysis includes an interview and a questionnaire.The study indicates that: First, learners whose vocabulary size is below3,000can learn unknown words through incidental vocabulary learning by reading.Second, different kinds of glossing ways make different effects on the incidental vocabulary learning. Bilingual glossing ways attribute to the learners suitably in incidental vocabulary learning, English glossing ways do better than Chinese glossing ways in words learning.Third, the learner’s different word levels also affect their incidental vocabulary learning. High level learners acquire unknown words better than medium or low level learners. And high level learners tend to choose bilingual or English glossing ways, while low level learners tend to do Chinese glossing ways.Therefore, in vocabulary teaching, English teachers should attach more importance to incidental vocabulary learning. English teachers should offer various types of glossing according to the learner’s English levels. The experiments indicate that bilingual glossing ways attribute to the learners best. So, in vocabulary learning, English teachers and learners should consider choosing bilingual glossing ways more to enlarge the learners’vocabularies and increase the learners’ reading abilities gradually, thus to improve the learners English levels.