A Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Textbook Reading Based On Output Hypothesis In Adult Vocational College

In recent years,higher vocational education including adult higher vocational education has developed rapidly in China.Because of the quality of the students' source and some other factors,the main problem English teachers face is that students' English level is quite difficult to improve.One of the most important causes of this situation is their small vocabulary.Traditional vocabulary learning approach is to recite words by rote and the result is usually regarded as a time consuming and labor intensive process which is usually ineffective.This approach tends to make students afraid of memorizing words,and their English level can not improve,either.Therefore,how to acquire vocabulary efficiently becomes the key to English improvement for vocational school students.Since Nagy,Herman&Anderson(1985)put forward the definition of "incidental vocabulary acquisition",there are many researches on factors of incidental vocabulary acquisition in second language reading home and abroad.Among different factors,effects of reading tasks,notes and frequency have received much attention,but effects of output haven't gained enough concern.The author attempts to undertake a research conducted in classroom teaching on theoretical basis of incidental vocabulary acquisition and output hypothesis and aims to find out an effective way to enlarge students' vocabulary.The research questions are as follows:(1)What is the relationship between students vocabulary size and the results of incidental vocabulary acquisition after textbook reading?(2)What are the differences of vocabulary learning results between output activities of experiment class and reading comprehension of control class?(3)How should English teachers do in order to enlarge students' vocabulary size efficiently?The author chooses eighty second-year students from Navy Staff College as subjects,and the experiment last three months and includes three steps.They are pre-test,post-tests,and interview.The subjects are asked to finish different activities after reading,and then the author analyzes and summarizes the results of students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.The research through interview and comparative analysis of pre-test and post-tests attempts to indicate that students can acquire vocabulary through text-book reading.The research confirms output activities have positive effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition.As the research conditions are confined,the subjects of the experiment are from one adult vocational college in Dalian.Maybe the situation of other vocational college couldn't be reflected exactly,and the output activities for incidental vocabulary acquisition needs more teaching practice.But,the research can still give certain guidance for English vocabulary teaching.