An Empirical Study Of Glossing Types Topic Familiarity And Incldental Vocabulary Acquisition In L2 Reading Process

Vocabulary is the foundation of language,and is also the basic component of phrase,sentence and passage.No matter whether it is for L1 or L2,a language speaker needs to acquire new words continuously.Vocabulary acquisition is an important part of language acquisition.There are two types of vocabulary acquisition i.e.intentional vocabulary acquisition and incidental vocabulary acquisition.When a language speaker's language proficiency has reached a certain level,the function and status of incidental vocabulary acquisition will become increasingly obvious.Reading comprehension and listening comprehension are two important paths of incidental vocabulary acquisition.When a language speaker reads a passage,he will come across new words from time to time.Providing glossing for the new words in a passage can help language speakers acquire new vocabulary incidentally.Glossing can be classified in terms of the glossing languages.This thesis is going to discuss three glossing types i.e.L1 glossing(Chinese glossing),L2 glossing(English glossing)and bilingual glossing(both Chinese and English glossing).This thesis will explore the effect of the three types of glossing on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The passages that a language speaker reads may vary in the degree of topic familiarity for some passages are more familiar to readers while some other passages may be less familiar.This passage is also going to look at the effect of topic familiarity on incidental vocabulary acquisition.The subjects of this research are 90 English majors in a university and they are equally allocated into three glossing groups and each group contains 30 subjects.The 90 subjects will read a more familiar passage and a less familiar passage.This paper concludes that the three glossing types didn't make a significant difference in both the immediate test and the delayed test.Topic familiarity made a significant difference in the acquisition and retention of the target words acquired incidentally.