The Effects Of Repetition On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Nagy (1987) was the first to define incidental vocabulary acquisition, a termwhich means that language learners, when they aren’t focused on words during thecompletion of a given learning task, acquire some new words incidentally andunconsciously. In2002, Ellis showed how language processing is intimately tuned toinput frequency, which has initiated extensive discussion in academia. Many foreignlanguage researchers have done a number of studies regarding the influence offrequency in second language acquisition, particularly in incidental vocabularylearning through extensive reading. However, less attention has been paid to this indomestic research.The present study of incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading, whichtested27graduate law students, investigated (i) whether graduate students can acquireunknown words incidentally,(ii) the effect of repeated encounters with target wordson the development of eight aspects of word knowledge,(iii) the set number ofrepetitions needed for students to incidentally learn a word,(iv) whether receptiveword knowledge can be more easily acquired than productive word knowledge, and (v)whether receptive word knowledge can be retained longer than productive wordknowledge with repeated exposures of the target words.The experiment consisted of three phases: a reading comprehension task, animmediate posttest, and a delayed posttest two weeks later. Each participant wasrandomly assigned to one of three experimental groups based on the number of targetword exposures (E3, E7, E10) in the readings. Each group read ten passages, eachpassage appearing on a single page. There were three main reading on E3, seven onE7, and ten on E10. There were ten target words in each main reading. Participantswere instructed in advance that there would be a reading comprehension test in orderto evaluate their attention to the readings (the participants were not instructed to payattention to target words). This comprehension test and the first posttest were handedout immediately after the reading materials were collected and returned to me. The posttest was made up of eight vocabulary tests, which were distributed to theparticipants one by one in the certain sequence, not all at once. Both receptive andproductive knowledge of orthography, association, and part of speech were measuredin the study, though knowledge of meaning and collocation was only measuredreceptively. The delayed posttest was applied two weeks later with the same eightvocabulary tests but without any reading materials.The major findings of the present study are as follows:1. Graduate students could incidentally learn unknown words through readingshort passages. Students tended to acquire partial knowledge of unknown words fromlimited occurrences in context.2. There was no significant difference in gains between3and7encounters and3and10encounters in almost all aspects of word knowledge except on PA.Furthermore, no significant difference was found between7and10encounters oneach of the eight dependent measures. That is to say, students’ word knowledge didnot improve with increased repetitions in the present study, which is different fromthe previous similar studies, especially from Webb (2007). However, this cannotrepresent the learning conditions under the influence of repetitions of unknown wordsdue to the four reasons I will state in sections that follow.3. Students started to acquire unknown words incidentally at3times, and7timesis enough to master an unknown word, while at10times students did not make muchimprovement in acquiring the words.4. Receptive word knowledge learning occurred earlier than productive wordknowledge, and students tended to gain more receptive knowledge than productiveword knowledge through extensive reading.5. The delayed test demonstrated that receptive word knowledge could beretained longer after repeated exposures than productive word knowledge, which wasvulnerable to forgetting as time goes on. In other words, repetition had largerlong-term benefits for receptive word knowledge than for productive word knowledge.