A Comparative Study On Intentional And Incidental Vocabulary Learning Of Students In Secondary Vocational School

In second language acquisition field, incidental and intentional vocabulary learninghave become a very hot area, and have attracted many researchers’ attention at home andabroad. In recent years, a large number of researchers abroad have proved the superiorityof the incidental learning over intentional learning. But, the researchers on secondlanguage acquisition in China hold different views on this. Therefore, the aim of this studyis to make a comparison and analysis of the effect of intentional and incidental vocabularylearning on Chinese secondary vocational school students’ English Learning. Though thereare various forms of learning vocabulary, due to students’ English proficient level and theconvenience of operating the experiment, reading is selected as incidental learning modeand memorizing words in wordlist is selected as intentional learning mode.This study is based on Input Hypothesis, Information processing theory and Depth ofProcessing theory. Two parallel classes of third-year students from Jinzhou Health Schoolare selected as experimental subjects. One class intentionally learns vocabulary throughreciting wordlist, and the other class incidentally learns vocabulary through reading. Themain research methods are questionnaire of vocabulary learning method and tests of targetwords, including immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test. The data in theexperiment are analyzed by the software SPSS. The major findings are summarized asfollows:1. The students of secondary vocational school can learn some new words by bothmemorizing words and reading material. Due to the clarity of purpose, students can learnmore words by intentional learning than incidental vocabulary learning within a short time.2. In intentional vocabulary learning, words that have been learnt are forgotten a lotafter two weeks; the retention rate is lower than that of incidental vocabulary learning.Therefore, in incidental learning, students can retain the vocabulary longer.3. Though the students of secondary vocational school can use both the twovocabulary modes, they more frequently used intentional vocabulary learning, but notincidental vocabulary learning.Based on the findings, pedagogical implications are proposed. For the purpose ofhelping learners improve English vocabulary retention rate and amount, English teachersshould give some guidance to students’ intentional vocabulary learning, and help learnerscombine the incidental and intentional learning modes in their English, enable students tolearn a foreign language more easily.