Effects Of Different Inputs On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Reading

This study was carried out to investigate the effect of different inputs on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading. The theories on which this study was based were Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis and Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading with different inputs to help English learners to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. Which type of input is the most effective in immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading for high school students, unmodified input, enhanced input, elaborated input or combined input?2. Which type of input is the most effective in delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading for high school students, unmodified input, enhanced input, elaborated input or combined input?3. Which type of input is the most effective in vocabulary acquisition retention between the immediate and delayed tests, unmodified input, enhanced input, elaborated input or combined input?Altogether80high school students, who had been selected from two intact parallel classes of Grade3at Mingda High school, took part in the experiment. The reasons why they were selected were that they were all instructed by the same English teacher and that they were mostly similar in their age, background and motivation. They were divided into four groups with20in each group and labeled as Group A, Group B, Group C and Group D. In order to make sure that their English proficiency was almost the same, the group division was made in a rotating order based on their English scores on the final examination in previous semester. Each group was randomly assigned for different inputs with Group A for unmodified input, Group B for enhanced input, Group C for elaborated input, and Group D for combined input. The instruments employed in this study were two vocabulary acquisition tests, based on the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) developed by Paribakht&Wesche (1993). The reading material was selected in terms of four factors:the length, the difficulty, the familiarity with the topic and the number of new words. The data were collected from immediate test and delayed test. Data analysis involved One-way ANOVA which was employed to find out whether there was a significant difference in incidental vocabulary acquisition between four types of inputs in both immediate and delayed tests.This study has generated the following major findings:First, there is a significant difference between unmodified input and combined input, and between enhanced input and combined input in immediate incidental vocabulary acquisition, which means combined input is more effective than both unmodified input and enhanced input in reading for high school students. This finding is in accordance with the conclusion in Kim’s (2003) and Wang’s (2009) studies. This may be that the combined input can make the target words more salient and the text more comprehensible. Noticing Hypothesis states that noticing is the pre-condition of any further information processing. The attention to the salient words leads to subsequent acquisition. Besides, Comprehensible Input Hypothesis indicates that "the access to comprehensible input is the characteristic of all cases of successful L2acquisition". So the comprehensible input leads to more effective vocabulary acquisition.Second, there is a significant difference between unmodified input and combined input, and between unmodified input and elaborated input in delayed incidental vocabulary acquisition, which means both combined input and elaborated input are more effective than unmodified input. The finding may be attributed to two reasons. One is that both combined input and elaborated input make target words highlighted by explanation and/or boldfacing which produces perceptual saliency of the words and thus attract readers’ attention. According to Noticing Hypothesis, attention is necessary for input to become available for further mental processing. The other is that elaboration of the target words makes the reading text more comprehensible to readers and that helps to achieve better acquisition in vocabulary.Third, all the four groups gained less incidental vocabulary acquisition in delayed test than in immediate test, which confirmed the Ebbinghaus’Forgetting Curve. One thing worth mentioning is that participants in enhanced input group, where the target words were typographically enhanced, performed the best among the four groups in terms of the retention rate. This may be that some participants looked up the target words they had met or noticed right after the immediate test. Therefore they had a deep impression of the target words and performed almost the same in the delayed test.The present study has its own limitations and calls for improvement in future related studies.First, the number of samples may not be large enough to be generalized to a lager population of high school students. Future studies can be carried out with a larger population from high schools of different levels so as to yield more convincing results.Second, though all the ten target words were identified as unknown by students in parallel class and two English teachers, it does not100%guarantee they were unknown to the participants in the experiment, which might to some extent affect the research results.Third, selection and modification of the reading material, design of the vocabulary tests and measures of scoring were finished by the researcher herself, so the subjectivity cannot be completely avoided.