| In recent years, studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition are enormous and flourishing at home and abroad. The majority of the study pays their attention to reading process, which is considered as an indispensable means to acquire words incidentally. However, as a primary method of language output, writing also promotes the incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA). Meanwhile, the word itself also influences the results of IVA. Among many factors, including part of speech, length of words and so on, the study on concreteness of words is scarce.Based on these two points, this study compares the gains and retention of concrete words and abstract words through sentence reading and writing for incidental vocabulary acquisition. This thesis aims to solve the following three research questions:1. With respect to the facilitation of incidental vocabulary acquisition, what’s the difference between sentence reading and writing?2. What impact do sentence reading and writing have on the acquisition of concrete words and abstract words?3. What impact do different tasks have on the retention of concrete words and abstract words?An experiment is conducted to tackle with the three questions. The experiment selects 64 junior university students from Shen Yang Normal university whose major are English as subjects. They are divided into Reading class and Writing class on average. Both classes receive ten target words, including five concrete words and five abstract words in the immediate test and delayed test. The immediate test aims to test which words are better acquired between concrete words and abstract words. And the delayed test intends to examine if the gains of the concrete words and abstract words change over time.The software SPSS 17.0 is employed to analyze the data which is collected from the immediate vocabulary test and delayed vocabulary test. Finally, the author arrives at the following conclusions: [1] gains and retention of target words in writing class are more effective than in the reading class. [2] no matter in reading or writing class, concrete words are more easily acquired than abstract words. [3] With respect to the retention of concrete words and abstract words, no matter in reading or writing class, concrete words remain insignificant. However, the retention of abstract words greatly decreases. |
