A Contrastive Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition And Intentional Vocabulary Learning Of Non-english Majors In China

Basically in second language acquisition, there are two vocabularylearning and instructional techniques: incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA) and intentional vocabulary learning (IVL). As many foreignscholars have advocated the use of IVA as the main vocabulary learningmethod, the situation in China is quite different, for many teachers andstudents still frequently adopt IVL in their English teaching and learning.Hence, the present research aims to make a contrastive study of theeffects of the two learning modes on vocabulary learning and retention ofnon-English majors in China.The present study is based on theories like Depth of Processing,Type of Processing-Resource Allocation and The Involvement LoadHypothesis. It enrolled86students who majored in FinancialManagement in Xi’an Fanyi University. They were divided into twogroups, each group adopting one of the two learning modes: learningvocabulary incidentally through reading plus comprehension questions ordirectly memorizing the target words in wordlists plus enhancementexercises. After the learning treatments, an immediate test includingmultiple choice of spelling, word meaning recall, gap filling andtranslation was administered to the subjects, with the former twomeasuring the subjects’ receptive knowledge and the latter two measuringtheir productive knowledge. Then a delayed test with the same items asthe immediate test was administered to the subjects two weeks later. Afterthe experiment, a questionnaire was also administered to the subjects toinvestigate their current vocabulary learning method. The data in theexperiment were analyzed through SPSS. The major findings are summarized as follows:1. In the immediate test, the intentional learning group outperformthe incidental learning group in terms of both the receptive andproductive vocabulary knowledge, especially in learning the orthographicforms and translating sentences with the target words.2. In the delayed test, the intentional learning group also outperformthe incidental learning group in terms of both the receptive andproductive vocabulary knowledge, especially in translating sentenceswith the target words.3. Incidental vocabulary learning through reading results in betterretention effects than intentional vocabulary learning in terms of bothreceptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. Thus, the incidentallearning mode is more effective in the retention of already-learnedvocabulary knowledge.Based on these findings, significant pedagogical implications havebeen proposed: teachers should reexamine the intentional learningmethod and introduce to the students proper rehearsal and practice timeand useful memory strategies. Besides, they should recognize the value ofIVA and adopt a combined approach of both modes to teach vocabulary.In addition, because of the importance of word exposure frequency,teachers should encourage students to do some extensive reading anddesign some after-reading tasks of different involvement loads to inducebetter learning results.