The Effect Of Different Forms Of Visual Input Enhancement On Junior High School Students’ Incidental Acquisition Of English Vocabulary

The researches on incidental acquisition of English vocabulary (IAEV) are drawing more and more attention of English teachers and scholars in second language acquisition (SLA). IAEV does not require students to recite the English words intentionally, but acquire English vocabulary incidentally while dealing with other learning tasks. A large amount of researches indicate that students can master quantities of English vocabulary by means of IAEV. Recently, although there are abundant researches on IAEV in foreign countries, the relative researches in China quite rare (Duan&Yan,2004; Gai,2003; Liu,2004; Zheng,2006; Tian,2008; Zhou&Lu,2010). Moreover, most researches of visual input enhancement (VIE) focus on the aspect of grammar instead of IAEV. In addition, most VIE appears in single form, little attention is paid to the effect of different forms of VIE on IAEV. Therefore, on the basis of noticing hypothesis, this study intends to investigate different forms of VIE on junior high school students’ IAEV.150participants from5parallel classes of Grade9were selected according to the scores of English mid-term exam of the first semester of Grade9and vocabulary level test. They were randomly assigned to four experimental groups and a control group. The experimental groups comprised underlining group, boldface group, italicization group and capitalization group. They read a reading passage containing10target words with single Chinese glosses, which were enhanced in different forms of VIE in different groups. The control group also read a reading passage but without enhancement. All participants were then required to take an immediate vocabulary test the moment they finished the reading task. Two weeks later, they were required to take a delayed vocabulary test, which contained the same content as the immediate except the order of the target words were arranged randomly.SPSS13.0for windows was used for analysing the data by means of One-way ANOVA. The major findings were:(1) VIE does affect junior high school students’ IAEV. However, its effect depends on the forms of VIE.(2) The forms of underlining and boldface can facilitate junior high school students’ IAEV effective. The form of italicization has certain facilitative effect on IAEV, nevertheless, the effect is quite limited. And capitalization has no significant effect on IAEV.The findings suggest that English teachers could make good use of VIE to draw students’ attention to the target words. Meanwhile, the publishers could apply VIE to the compilation of English textbooks.