Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Research Of Senior High School From Dynamic System Theory Perspective

It is universally acknowledged that vocabulary is crucial to English learning. Forsenior high school students, enlarging vocabulary is an important channel to improvetheir English proficiency. The size of vocabulary also has a direct effect on thedevelopment of listening, speaking, reading and writing. At the same time, vocabularyis always an important part in College Entrance Examination. According to the newedition exam guideline, all aspirants are required to master about3500vocabulary,apart from grammar and phonetic knowledge. However, the effect of memorizingvocabulary proved to be unsatisfactory. Therefore, we need to explore effectivemethods to memorize words. There are mainly two methods of vocabulary acquisition:Intentional Learning and Incidental Acquisition. It is impossible for teachers to spendmost of their time on vocabulary teaching during one lesson. In recent years, manyscholars and teachers attach great importance to incidental vocabulary acquisition.English movies and newspapers also can provide a lot of native English materials.Students can gain incidental vocabulary by reading the materials they are interested in.They will benefit a lot from extensive reading, which is also the most effective way toenlarge vocabulary. However, in actual vocabulary teaching, teachers pay moreattention to the practice of pronunciation, meanings, and the explanation of parts ofspeech; ignoring the interaction of influence factor in vocabulary acquisition.Therefore, the vocabulary students mastered is a kind of static accumulation, ratherthan the result of dynamic using. The acquired vocabulary lacks generation andcreativity. In this situation, it is very necessary to introduce the dynamic system theoryinto incidental vocabulary acquisition. This paper analyzes some significant factors ofincidental vocabulary acquisition from the perspective of dynamic system theory.The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of different processingmethods, which are based on dynamic system theory, on the acquisition of Englishvocabulary in reading materials. The subjects are90senior high school students fromsenior2, Ling Xian senior high school. Each group with30subjects is given onemethod. Method1is reading comprehension, method2is reading comprehension combining learned lexical knowledge, and method3is reading comprehensioncombining learned lexical knowledge as well as making sentences. Each method isclosely related to the understanding of target words. There is an immediate posttestand a delayed posttest one week later. Except the different order of the same targetwords, delayed posttest is the same as the immediate one. The subjects who receivethe three methods are blind to the purpose of the experiment. After the experiment, thedata is analyzed by SPSS.Three key research questions (RQ) are put forward as follows:1) Could senior high school students easily acquire vocabulary under thecircumstances of activities based on dynamic system in reading materials?2) Will student’s long-term retention of target words be affected by differentprocessing method from the perspective of DST?3) Are the activities based on dynamic system more useful for vocabularyacquisition than reading alone?After careful experimental design and systematic analysis of the statistic data,finally we draw the following findings:1) Senior high school students can acquire vocabulary incidentally under thecircumstance of activities based on DST in reading materials.2) Different reading processing methods have different effects on the incidentalvocabulary acquisition of Senior high school students.3) Method3(reading comprehension combining learned lexical knowledge aswell as making sentence) has provoked the best incidental vocabulary acquisitiongains and retentions than method2(reading comprehension combining learned lexicalknowledge) and method1(only reading comprehension); and method2is also muchbetter than method1.The findings of the present study have great theoretical and practical significanceboth in the English teaching and learning. It will be more effective for senior highschool students to enlarge their vocabulary through the method of extensive readingrather than learning wordlists by rote. Some suggestions are proposed in order toimprove senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition gains and retentions. Teachers also should give learners some guides in reading materials andfoster their ability in guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words from the context aswell as combine them with the learned knowledge to form the knowledge network.