An Application Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Theory In English Extensive Reading Course

Vocabulary is the building materials of language. It is a combination of sound,meaning and a kind of grammar stereotypes. At the same time it is the smallestlinguistic unit that can be used independently (Wang De-chun,1997). The vocabularyis one of the basic elements of the language, but also the key to master the language.If there is no word, we could not form the sentence, not to say the language. Languagelearning can not be separated from the accumulation of vocabulary knowledge andvocabulary expansion. And as the linguist Singer said,“in the reading process,people’s understanding for the lexical meaning accounts for39%of the reading ability,separate vocabulary plays47%of the part in understanding the meaning of the wordsin the text, and vocabulary identify accounts for28%of the reading speed”.(SunXing,1998) Foreign language teaching is inseparable from the vocabulary learning.Vocabulary learning runs through the whole process of language learning. In thereading teaching, English extensive reading as an important basic course is commonfor the students of Grade One and Two majoring for English in the colleges, whoseteaching outline generally requires that in two-year study, students’ English readingspeed can reach120-180words each minute, and they are able to read all kinds ofEnglish materials and articles with medium difficulty, grasp the main argument andplot of the texts, and can set about reasoning analysis according to the readingmaterials.Therefore, the purpose of extensive reading course should make students mastermore reading skills, read articles with a higher speed and achieve the correctunderstanding. Extensive reading is an effective way, playing an irreplaceable role invocabulary acquisition. However, there exist a lot of problems in extensive readingteaching. First of all, let’s talk about it from the students’ learning characteristic:students’ foundation is uneven and the polarization is serious. Students’ reflections inthe classrooms are different, some classes are active and some classes are very dreary. At the same time vocabulary is also the fundamental and essential content inEnglish Extensive Reading. But the teacher may be in a dilemma while teaching: onone hand, they try to teach more words as possible as they can, on the other hand, theycan not input a lot of time in vocabulary teaching in order to finish their readingcomprehension task. In connection to this kind of phenomenon, there are someforeign researchers who begin to study the theory of the Incidental VocabularyAcquisition in extensive teaching (Nagy1987, Krashen1989, Laufer1998), and thengradually form the theory of the Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition. That is, studentscan understand the meaning of words with the help of context clues when theycomplete the task of learning to read, thus they can make the reading comprehensionand vocabulary acquisition a combination. The core is to obtain the meaning throughthe context, and then we should know the context clues in the discourse playing a keyrole in extensive reading.The advocators of this theory think if learners do some widely reading with thepurpose of getting the meaning and contact a large amount of comprehensible input inthe context, they can naturally acquire most vocabulary they need without directvocabulary teaching. Furthermore, with the development of psychological languagereading model, it is considered to be the best way of vocabulary learning to infer theword meaning in the context and acquire vocabulary incidentally. Students should beencouraged to obtain the meaning from context. The current trend of teaching is toemphasize to apply the context clues to incidental or consequential vocabularylearning. This paper reviews the theoretical basis for incidental vocabulary acquisition,and gives a brief introduction to the definition of incidental vocabulary acquisitionand talk about the differences between incidental vocabulary acquisition andintentional vocabulary learning. At the same time, it also presents the importantfunction of the theory of Input and Output in extensive reading. And it is also throughan empirical research to investigate the effectiveness of Incidental VocabularyAcquisition in extensive reading. Sixty English majors from Chang chun Teacher’sCollege were chosen as subjects in the research. One reading material was chosen. Atthe first step,60subjects in the two groups were required to take Nation’s Vocabulary Levels Test in order to distinguish and ensure their vocabulary levels. They weregiven15minutes to finish the test. At the second step, three days later, all the subjectswere assigned a pretest to test the target words in10minutes. At the third step, afterone week, the subjects were given an English reading material and asked to finishreading it in10minutes. After the reading activity, the subjects were given a postteston the target words, and the time limit was10minutes. There were small changes inword order between pretest and posttest. The analysis of the experimental resultsshows that incidental vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading is an effectiveway to vocabulary learning for college students in China. Furthermore, althoughGroup1(lower vocabulary level students) achieved lower scores in the pretest butduring the posttest Group1(lower vocabulary level students) received higher rate ofincidental vocabulary acquisition. From this we can know it is necessary to adopt theincidental vocabulary acquisition approach appropriately for different levels ofstudents in vocabulary learning process to enlarge their vocabulary.