A Comparative Study On Improving Vocabulary Acquisition Of Non-English Majors By Reading Plus And Narrow Reading

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the essential tasks in foreign language learning. Listening, speaking,reading, writing and translation can not even exist without vocabulary. Realizing the importance of vocabulary,more and more researchers and teachers have attempted to explore some effective methods for vocabulary acquisition. Reading Plus Vocabulary Enhancement Activities and Narrow Reading also have been studied extnsively at home and abroad. The former means that learners are asked to finish some vocabulary exercises to consolidate them after reading while the latter one focuses on reading some related articles thematically to acquire vocabulary.The purpose of this study is to make a comparison and analysis of Reading Plus Vocabulary Enhancement Activities and Narrow Reading based on the theory of “Depth of Processing” of Craik & Lockhart and Krashen's “Input Hypothesis”. It aims to explore the different impacts on the vocabulary acquisition and the vocabulary's form, meaning and meaning recognition among non-English majors by these two different methods. The author selected two classes of non-English majors from Northwest Normal University as subjects.The Journalism major is treated as Reading Plus group and the Accounting major is Narrow Reading group.Different methods and tasks were used in these two classes during the experiment. Before the experiment, pre test was conducted to affirm the target words and the post tests were arranged in the last week, and two weeks later the delayed test was carried out. 40 target words were treated as the testing content to explore the effectiveness of Reading Plus and Narrow Reading on improving learners' vocabulary acquisition and retention.Besides, the author made a comparison and test among the target words' form, meaning and meaning recognition. All the data collected from the experiment were analyzed by SPSS 17.0, and the conclusions were that:1. Both reading plus and narrow reading are effective on vocabulary acquisition, however the reading plus method shows its advantages in the vocabulary retention.2. Reading plus and narrow reading almost have the same impact on the meaning recognition, while in terms of form recall and meaning recall, reading plus shows its advantages.Based on these findings, reading plus is more suitable for the non- English majors, especially for the freshmen, so reading plus should be adopted extensively, and narrow reading method could be used complementally.