A Study Of Improving Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Level Through English Newspaper Reading

Vocabulary is the one of the important factors that influences the effect of study inforeign language learning, especially in ESL. Therefore, vocabulary teaching has always beenan issue under research. Since English vocabularies are broad, it’s crucial to learn how tolearn and master practical vocabularies. College English Curriculum also points out thatEnglish teaching should be beneficial to broaden students’ view and enrich students’knowledge. Traditional vocabulary teaching approach can’t meet the requirement of life andincidental vocabulary acquisition has been paid more attention. English newspapers is a goodapproach for students to learn English vocabularies and study current affairs, politics,economy and culture with the characteristics of current information, novelty, interesting andcomprehensive. Therefore, English newspapers has been paid more attention and become aresource for teaching. Most of the studies about English newspaper reading focus onimproving reading level and actually, English newspapers are good resources for expandingstudents’ vocabularies.This study introduces English newspapers to classroom teaching to make up thedeficiency of classroom teaching in order to guide students to learn vocabularies incidentallythrough reading newspapers. The subjects for study are60students from a college in Anshan.They are the sophomores of non-English majors. The English level of the two classes is thesame. One of the classes is designed as experiment class and the other is control class. Theinstruments used in the experiment are tests, questionnaire and interview. By analyzing130pieces of questionnaires, it is concluded that current college English classroom is not relatednews English. The teacher instructs students with good vocabulary learning strategies basedon theories of incidental vocabulary acquisition, and students’ comprehension level can beimproved, but proper involvement and good learning strategies contribute more to vocabularylearning.The study comes to the conclusion that English newspapers can help students’ incidentalvocabulary acquisition, and it can be used as resource for teaching. Teachers should useeffective vocabulary teaching strategies to instruct students which can improve the effect ofvocabulary learning and it is significant to further study of vocabulary teaching throughEnglish newspapers.