The Effect Of Topic Familiarity On Incidental Vocabulary Learning Of Vocational College Students

In recent years, the proportion of vocational college studentshas been increasing with the support of the government. English isone of the basic compulsory courses for vocational college students.However, their poor English, low interest in learning and small vocabulary posed a great challenge for the English teachers invocational colleges. Studies have shown that reading widelycontributes to incidental vocabulary acquisition. In the recent twodecades, researches at home and abroad have been conducted toexamine the factors that may influence incidental vocabularyacquisition during reading. However, a potential factor─the topicfamiliarity or background knowledge has been rarely explored in thestudies available. In this study, the impact of topic familiarity onincidental vocabulary learning has been investigated in ESL context.The incidental vocabulary learning results of the subjects’ areanalyzed with SPSS13.0for the students of two constructivedecoration classes in Inner Mongolian Vocational College ofChemical Engineering. The results manifest that though topicfamiliarity has a positive role in text comprehension, it has negativeeffects on the episodic memory storage, and better long-termmemory storage can be found in topic-familiar text. This result isanalyzed with the help of information processing theory and noticingtheory in psycho-linguistics. In a sense, the study has provided uswith the chance of deep insights into incidental word learning underthe influence of topic familiarity, thus helping to promote furtherdevelopment of the incidental vocabulary learning of vocationalcollege students.