The Effects Of Glossing Types On The Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

In recent years incidental vocabulary acquisition becomes the hot spot in the study of L2vocabularyacquisition. The present study mostly focuses on the incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.Many studies about the incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading have proved that both the secondlanguage (L2) learners and the first language learners (L1) can incidentally acquire new words throughreading, but the probability of vocabulary acquisition is quite low.Providing glosses for new words in texts is an efficient input enhancement technique. The presentstudy aims to investigate the effects of different glossing types (single Chinese glossing, single Englishglossing, single Chinese plus English glossing, multiple-choice Chinese glossing and multiple-choiceEnglish glossing) on the incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading and which kind of glossinglanguage and glossing form are best for incidental vocabulary acquisition.With the theoretical support of bilingual lexicon, depth of processing theory, involvement loadhypothesis, the author designed an experiment to investigate the effects of five glossing types on theincidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.152students from three parallel classes in a juniorcollege were chosen as the experimental subjects, whose vocabulary size was between2000and3000words. They were divided into five groups and were respectively required to read the passage with one kindof the five glossing types. There were ten target words in the passage boldfaced. After reading and finishingthe post-reading tasks the subjects were informed to take an immediate vocabulary test and then there was aquestionnaire investigation on which kind of glossing type preferred by the intermediate-level non-Englishmajor learners. One week later a delayed vocabulary test was carried out to find out the result of wordsretention.The present paper aimed to investigate which kind of glossing language and glossing form is mostbeneficial for the incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading and the author also tried to answerthree questions through the experiment:(1) Which glossing types are preferred by the intermediate-levelEnglish learners, single Chinese glosses, single English glosses, single Chinese plus English glosses,multiple-choice Chinese glosses or multiple-choice English glosses?(2) Which glossing language and glossing form are most beneficial for the incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading for theintermediate-level English learners in the immediate test?(3) Which glossing language and glossing formare best for the words retention in the delayed vocabulary test? The data analysis revealed that the Chineseplus English glosses were preferred by the intermediate-level learners. In the immediate test the Chineseglosses and the Chinese plus English glosses is much better for incidental vocabulary acquisition than theEnglish glosses and the multiple-choice glosses is more beneficial for the incidental vocabulary acquisitionthan the single glosses. In the delayed test the results showed there was no significant difference among theeffects of the five glossing types on the incidental vocabulary acquisition, namely words retention was notinfluenced by different glossing types.This significance of this research enriched the related studies about incidental vocabulary acquisitionthrough reading and offered some helpful suggestion for the vocabulary learning, vocabulary teaching andreading materials compilers.