The Impact Of Topic Interest And L2 Proficiency On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Trough Reading

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of language,and vocabulary acquisition is very important for language learners to learn the language well.There are two main approaches to vocabulary learning: intentional vocabulary learning and incidental vocabulary acquisition.In recent years,more and more researchers have attached importance on incidental vocabulary acquisition and there are many factors influencing L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition such as different reading tasks or purposes,vocabulary size of learners,the learners' guessing abilities,different learning strategies and so on.This study aims to investigate the impact of topic interest,and L2 proficiency on L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.The study was based on the theory of “Involvement Load Hypothesis”(Laufer& Hulstijn,2001).This theory puts forward that motivational factors affect the learning process,that is,the content of involvement includes both motivational and cognitive factors.Cognitive factors contain language proficiency,and motivational factors include interest.In terms of the experiment,there are two kinds of tasks,namely,vocabulary tests and reading comprehension,and the vocabulary tests include pretest and posttest.The research questions are as follows: 1)Will topic interest significantly impact incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading? 2)Will L2 proficiency significantly impact incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading? 3)Which level of L2 proficiency will be impacted more by topic interest?The subjects in this study are 126 middle school students in grade three.After analyzing the data,the study has produced the following findings: 1)Topic interest will significantly impact incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading;2)The students with high L2 proficiency gain more incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading;3)Only the high proficient readers gained significantly more vocabulary from the high-interest passage than the low-interest passage.