The Effects Of Extracurricular Reading On English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is the building block of language skills. However, nowadays the disadvantages of traditional English teaching still affect some teachers and learners, resulting in the phenomenon that the senior high school teachers spend much time on vocabulary teaching with low efficiency. Most students still have problems such as lack of vocabulary and improper use of it. With the further development of the new curriculum reform carried out in Jiangsu, the senior high school students are supposed to have an acquisition of a larger vocabulary than before according to the new curriculum standards, so how to learn and master vocabulary positively and effectively remains to be solved urgently. All the times, reading is widely recognized as a good way to promote students’ vocabulary acquisition by many researchers who are devoted to foreign languages’ teaching. However, due to arduous teaching tasks and limited teaching time, it definitely can’t meet the higher requirements of vocabulary only by following and reading after teachers in class to learn vocabulary, so it is especially important for students to make the most of their spare time to do extracurricular reading and acquire vocabulary incidentally.In this paper, a research into the effects of English extracurricular reading on incidental vocabulary acquisition was carried out for nearly four months, in which sixty students of Grade Three in one of rural three-star high schools in Nanjing were involved. Before the experiment, the author used a questionnaire, an interview as well as a small test of vocabulary to get a general understanding about the students’ levels of extracurricular reading and vocabulary acquisition. Then the students were divided into two groups, carrying on a vocabulary test and an experiment by designing different tasks for the same reading materials in order to help them to find effective ways to improve their vocabulary acquisition, hoping to promote and supply the methods of current vocabulary teaching through the selection of reading materials and the guidance of reading skills and strategies at the same time.The author has drawn the following conclusions from the experiment. Firstly, the senior students can acquire vocabulary incidentally through extracurricular reading; Secondly, the students who do more extracurricular reading have competence to acquire vocabulary incidentally; Thirdly, the students who have a large vocabulary perform better than the ones who have a small vocabulary; Fourthly, different subjects and types of reading materials and different tasks designed for extracurricular reading may contribute to different effects on vocabulary acquisition, especially the narratives and those relevant materials that are closely related to the students’ lives and study can easily arouse the students’ interest, leading to good effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition; Fifthly, after reading, if the students can learn to take down the new vocabulary from the reading materials under the guidance of the teachers, they are more likely to acquire a larger vocabulary incidentally through practice like filling in the blanks or making sentences using the vocabulary learnt; Last but not the least, if the students lack revision of the new vocabulary, they will forget them easily.The research may throw some light on the English vocabulary teaching and learning for Chinese Middle School teachers and students. On the one hand, it is necessary and important for teachers to monitor and guide the students who are doing extracurricular reading, helping them to develop some reading skills and build up some strategies, which will help students improve the efficiency of incidental vocabulary acquisition; On the other hand, for the students, they can enlarge their vocabulary by reading some interesting materials extensively rather than only limiting to recite wordlists, which is simplex and boring.