The Effects Of Word Exposure Frequency And L1Lexicalization On Chinese College Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

This study set out to investigate how word exposure frequency and L1lexicalization affect Chinese college students’incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention of acquired word knowledge. Thus the experimental questions of the present study are proposed as follows:a) Do word exposure frequencies in reading passages increase Chinese college students’ acquisition of word knowledge regarding part of speech, associations, meaning and form in both receptive and productive ways?b) Do English words that are not lexicalized in Chinese cause any difficulty in English vocabulary acquisition? In addition, whether the increasing number of word exposures contributes to the learning of both L and NL words’meaning?c) Do word exposure frequencies in reading passages and L1lexicalization affect Chinese college students’retention of previously-acquired word knowledge through reading?The current investigation was administrated on the basis of Chuntien Chen&Truscott (2010) and Paribakht (2005), making reference to the research of Webb (2007) on word repetition and multiple aspects of word knowledge.118non-English major sophomores from Lanzhou University attended the experiment. They were randomly assigned to three experimental groups according to their encounters of target words (one encounter, three encounters and seven encounters) during reading. There were three phrases of this experiment. Firstly, three groups of participants were asked to respectively finish seven pages of reading task with each page including a coherent and meaningful story. Each group was exposed to different number of target words with these seven-page reading materials. Shortly after the reading task, the second phase of the experiment started off with the reading comprehension test which included five questions based on what the participants have read, and then followed by five vocabulary tests in which various kinds of lexical knowledge were measured. Finally, a delayed posttest involved with only5vocabulary tests was conducted two weeks after the immediate posttest. The major findings of the present study revealed that, a) increasing word exposures in reading passages did facilitate Chinese college students’partial gains of receptive and productive word knowledge; a sizable amount of both receptive and productive lexical knowledge could be acquired through repeated encounters in reading texts; b) L1lexicalization did affect L2vocabulary learning, especially in meaning. L2words that were not lexicalized in learners’L1language indeed caused trouble for learning, both immediately and after a two-week delay. Furthermore, the data also reported that adding the number of encounters up to seven made little contributions to the learning of NL words’knowledge. Therefore, it turned out that explicit instruction was essential for the development of NL words’ knowledge besides repeated word encounters in reading; c) Word exposure frequencies in reading passages and L1lexicalization had significant effects on the retention of previously-acquired word knowledge through reading. The participants could retain a part of previously-acquired word knowledge in the long term in spite of a general diminution of lexical gains of both L and NL words.