Sentence Reading And Writing For Second Language Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

In recent years, the incidental vocabulary acquisition has attracted much attention of researchers in SLA. However, studies comparing the relative effectiveness of reading and writing for incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition are scarce. Opinions differ regarding whether it is reading a word in a context or writing that word in a sentence can better promote the incidental acquisition of vocabulary in a second language. The present study replicates Pichette et al.'s (2012) study,which has relatively high intrinsic and external validities, with the purpose of examining the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences for the incidental vocabulary acquisition for Chinese-speaking intermediate and advanced English learners. It also compares the vocabulary acquisition of the words and the concrete words to investigate how word recall is influenced by the word concreteness.The subjects are 84 English majors enrolled in a Chinese university. The target words are the same 16 English rare words used in Pichette et al.'s (2012) study, half of which are concrete words and half are abstract words. Explanations of the target words are given in Chinese. The reading task requires the subjects to read three sentences containing the target words and the writing task requires the subjects to write three original sentences with target words. A within-subjects design is adopted and a cued recall is conducted immediately and one week later after the treatments to measure the short- and long-term memory of the target words. The data collected are analyzed using SAS 9.3.The results are as follows. (1) The writing task leads to significantly better vocabulary acquisition compared with the reading task. It verifies the findings in Pichette et al.'s (2012) study and supports the Involvement Load Hypothesis and the Depths of Processing Theory. (2) Different from Pichette et al.'s (2012) study, there is no significant difference between the acquisition of the abstract words and that of the concrete words,though the mean scores for the concrete words are higher. However, in Pichette et al.'s(2012) study, the difference reached a significant value, with concrete words scoring significantly higher. (3) In combination with variables of time and word concreteness,this study finds that the superiority of the writing task is supported only by the concrete words while for the acquisition of the abstract words the writing task is no longer more effective than the reading task. In addition, the vocabulary retention in the delayed recall test is significantly lower than the acquisition in the immediate recall test.The present study provides further empirical support for the Involvement Load Hypothesis and the Depths of Processing Theory. Moreover, word-related factors are not taken into consideration when assessing the vocabulary-learning potential of a task in the Involvement Load Hypothesis. Howeveri,it is found in the current study that the efficacy of the writing task for word retention is influenced by the concreteness of the target words. This is one of the major contributions of this study and it is of great significance on the further completing of the Involvement Load Hypothesis. Lastly, the difference between the acquisition of the abstract words and the concrete words fails to reach a significant level which is different from Pichette et al.'s (2012) study. It underscores the need for more studies to investigate whether the more concrete words can be significantly better acquired as found in previous studies.