An Empirical Study Of Junior Middle School Students,Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through English Newspaper Reading

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of language. As Wilkins(1972) says “Without grammar, little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.” Therefore, vocabulary learning plays a very significant role in language learning. In the field of second language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition occupies a vital position, in which incidental vocabulary acquisition has attracted extensive attention from researchers in recent years. Compared with intentional vocabulary learning, incidental vocabulary acquisition is a kind of learning that learners can acquire vocabulary incidentally during the process of doing other tasks like reading newspaper magazines, listening songs ect. which are relevant to second language, although learners' attention are not paid on vocabulary.The present study focuses on incidental vocabulary acquisition of junior middle school students through newspaper reading, and addresses the following issues:(1)Can junior middle school students acquire vocabulary incidentally through English newspaper reading?(2)Do different reading tasks have different impacts upon students' incidental vocabulary acquisition in immediate test? If yes, are reading tasks with involvement load more effective than reading only for learners' acquisition of vocabulary?(3)Does task with higher involvement load have better influence on students' incidental vocabulary retention in delayed test and post test ? If yes, how does it affect?The author conducts an 8-week-experiment on 158 subjects, who come from three parallel classes in grade two, Jiujiang No.2 Junior Middle School, Jiangxi Province. Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis Theory, subjects are divided into groups in the aspect of reading tasks. Additionally, instruments like vocabulary test, interview are adopted to investigate students' performance in the experiment. Data collected in the experiment is sorted out and analyzed by SPSS 16.0.Results of the experiment show:(1) Junior middle school students can acquire vocabulary incidentally through newspaper reading;(2) Different tasks have different impacts upon students' incidental vocabulary acquisition in immediate test, and reading tasks with involvement load are more effective than reading only for learners' acquisition of vocabulary;(3) Under the same conditions, reading task with higher involvement load has better effects upon students' incidental vocabulary retention than task with lower involvement load in delayed test, while the effects on incidental vocabulary retention in post-test are not very good.Results of this study provide pedagogical implications for vocabulary learning of junior middle school students as well as English vocabulary teaching. On one hand, students can extend their vocabulary size and broaden ways of vocabulary learning through reading interesting newspaper passages. On the other hand, teachers can provide suitable instructions and design some tasks for students' newspaper reading, like the impartment of vocabulary acquisition and retention strategy, tasks with certain involvement load, and facilitate students to acquire vocabulary more efficiently.