A Study Of The Effects Of Different Glossing Types On Junior School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

“Words are basic building blocks of language, the units of meaning from which larger structures such as sentences, paragraphs and whole texts are formed”.While, for most EFL learners, vocabulary is one of the difficulties they meet in their English learning. Until now, it’s agreed that there are two modes of vocabulary learning,: one is intentional learning and the other is incidental vocabulary learning. The term of incidental vocabulary learning was firstly proposed by Nagy, Herman and Anderson in 1985. And then it has been the hot topic for linguists and researchers home and abroad. Many studies about the incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading have proved that both the second language(L2) learners and the first language learners(L1) can incidentally acquire new words through reading, but the probability of vocabulary acquisition is quite low. Providing glosses for new words in texts is an efficient input enhancement technique.As the researches went deeper, a lot of researchers began to focus on the effects of glosses on vocabulary incidental learning in reading. They conducted experiments on the languages of glosses(L1 and L2), the styles of glosses(single and multiple-choices), and the positions of glosses(footnote, margentnote and endnote). In China, in recent ten years, the effects of glosses on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading have been concerned by more and more linguists and researchers. Because of the differences in subjects, reading materials, duration and some other conditions, not all the conclusions of the presented researches were always the same, which supplied spaces and chances to the new following studies.Based on the presented theories and researches, this study focused on the effects of different types of glosses(Chinese, English and Chinese plus English)on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading with theoretical support of the models of L2 lexical acquisition, Depth of Processing Theory and Input Hypothesis Theory. In the experiment, 65 students from three parallel classes in Jiao Yuan middle school were chosen as the experimental subjects, whose vocabulary size was almost in the same level. They were divided into three groups and were respectively required to read the passage with one kind of the three glossing types. There were eight target words in the passage boldfaced. After reading and finishing the post-reading tasks the subjects were informed to take an immediate vocabulary test and then there was a questionnaire investigation on which kind of glossing type preferred by the junior students. One week later a delayed vocabulary test was carried out to find out the result of words retention.The present paper aimed to investigate which kind of glossing type is most beneficial for the incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading and the author also tried to answer three questions through the experiment:(1) Which glossing types are preferred by the junior students, Chinese glosses, English glosses, or Chinese plus English glosses?(2) Which glossing types is best in the immediate test, Chinese glosses, English glosses, or Chinese plus English glosses?(3) Which glossing type is best for the words retention in the retention vocabulary test? The data analysis revealed that the Chinese plus English glosses were preferred by junior students. In both the immediate and retention test the Chinese glosses and the Chinese plus English glosses is much better for incidental vocabulary acquisition than the English glosses. The results showed there was no significant difference between the effects of the Chinese glosses and the Chinese plus English glosses on the incidental vocabulary acquisition.This research was of both theoretical and practical significance. It not only confirmed the feasibility of incidental vocabulary acquisition again in theory, but also practically supplied reference for English learners in choosing English reading material, and improving vocabulary learning efficiency. What’s more, it also supplied guidance for teachers both to choose teaching material in class and to supervise students’ reading after class for a better effect. At last, it offered some references to those compilers and editors of English reading materials so as to compile more suitable reading materials for readers at different English proficiency levels.