Effects Of Narrow Reading On Chinese High School Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition And Retention

Narrow reading (NR) refers to reading a series of texts addressing one specific topic or written by one author. This study was undertaken to explore the effects of NR on enhancing senior high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention. The theoretical framework in the present study includes incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA), input hypothesis and affective-filter hypothesis. The significance of this study lies in helping investigate the effects of IVA and NR on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) vocabulary acquisition and retention and enrich the research on NR, helping raise learners’awareness of utilizing NR to promote their vocabulary learning and to build up their confidence in English learning and helping teachers realize the impact and effectiveness of NR so as to put it into practice.There are two research questions:1) What effect does narrow reading have on Chinese high school students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention? 2) What effect does narrow reading have on high-achievers’ and low-achievers’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention respectively? The subjects were 110 freshmen in the senior high school. The treatments are two instructional conditions:NR and random extensive reading. The subjects were thus divided into two groups:a NR group of 56 students, whose 4 reading materials focused on one topic; and a control group of 54 students, whose 4 reading materials were about completely different topics. They were required to read one article in 12 minutes at the same time every day and they read four articles over 4 days in total. Relative exercises were required to be finished after reading in order to ensure participants’ active participation. Before the treatment, a pretest was carried out to determine 10 target words for vocabulary acquisition and retention tests and to adapt reading materials. The data were collected by an immediate vocabulary test and a delayed one. both of which consist of an English to Chinese (E-C) word translation task, a sentence production task, a Chinese to English (C-E) word translation task and a gap-fill task. The SPSS 19.0 for Windows was used to process the data of the experiment.The major findings yielded from this study are as follows:Compared with the random extensive reading, NR has a significantly positive influence on the acquisition and retention of vocabulary knowledge. According to the study, it can promote the acquisition and retention of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. For one thing, as for vocabulary acquisition, there are significant differences between the NR group and the random extensive reading group in both receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition. which reveals that NR can help learners make out meanings of new words and take notice of the proper usage. For another, in terms of vocabulary retention, as time passes, learners more or less forget some receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge, but learners who read materials of the same topic can retain more words than those who do not, which reveals that words learnt by narrow reading can be preserved more efficiently after a long time. All the findings above suggest that NR is a relatively efficient way to learn words incidentally and to preserve what they have learnt effectively. In addition, learners have a better performance in the isolation test than the context test, which reveals that they tend to learn isolated words and their meaning rather than actual usage.Besides, in terms of different language proficiency, the method of NR is more appropriate for high-achievers than low-achievers according to the present research. To be specific, when compared with the control group, high-achievers in the NR group have a better performance on IVA and vocabulary retention while low-achievers do not have any prominent advantages. As for vocabulary acquisition, NR is a more effective way for high-achievers to acquire vocabulary incidentally than random extensive reading. In contrast, different from high-achievers, almost no obvious advantages are found from low-achievers’performance in the NR group. As for vocabulary retention, high-achievers in the NR group performed better in the retention test, which indicates that NR has a long-term effect on their vocabulary memorization than random extensive reading. On the contrary, NR just has a slightly positive influence on low-achievers’ vocabulary retention.Pedagogical implications from the study are as follows:First, teachers should use NR as a supplementary way to help learners acquire words; second, teachers should select proper reading materials when applying NR to their teaching; third, teachers should guide learners, especially low-achievers, to build their own glossary and ask them to use these words.