A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Context And Grammatical Context On Senior High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition From Reading

When learning English vocabulary during school, more and more students are still studying new words by teachers’ instructions, word list recitation and a variety of word activities consciously, which are not only tiresome but also with inconspicuous effects. Therefore, it is always a crucial issue for scholars to explore ways for students to acquire new words from reading.Incidental vocabulary acquisition was first proposed by Nagy, Herman and Anderson in 1985 when they research how children acquire their first language vocabulary, which, to some extent, solves one of the problems in vocabulary learning. Huckin and Coady(1999) believe that incidental vocabulary learning has an advantage over other ways of lexical learning because it is contextualized. In the present teaching environment, in order to improve the efficiency of students’ vocabulary memory, the research applies lexical context theory and grammatical context theory to the vocabulary learning in senior middle school. That is to say, different linguistic contexts are set by teachers in different passages so that students can infer the word meaning and acquire the word usage perfectly.This study will be presented from the following aspects:Firstly, in terms of lexical context and grammatical context, which one better facilitates learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in meaning?Secondly, in terms of lexical context and grammatical context, which one better facilitates learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in usage?Participants are 123 students in Senior Grade 3 in Jingyang Senior High School. There are three parallel classes in this experiment: Class 4 is used to select the target words in the pilot study. Class 5 is assigned as the lexical group(LG), and Class 6 as the grammatical group(GG). The two experimental groups are tested during the first period class and the second period class separately. After the pretests in both groups, students in the lexical group receive the passage related to lexical context followed by the posttest, while students in grammatical group are given the passage related to grammatical context followed by the posttest. The research applied quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data by SPSS17.0.The results indicate that both grammatical context and lexical context facilitate learner’s incidental vocabulary acquisition. Besides, compared with lexical context, grammatical context better facilitates learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in word meaning and usage.Generally speaking, both lexical and grammatical context have great influence on students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading. Compared with reciting new words traditionally and intentionally, reading in lexical and grammatical context has more advantages. In the meanwhile, in contrast with lexical context, word meaning and word usage can be better acquired in grammatical contexts, but the difference is not significant. The present study is beneficial to students’ inferring word meaning and acquiring word usage in self-reading and has a positive effect on teachers’ selecting reading materials for students in teaching.