The Research On The Role Of Graded Reading In Junior High School Students' English Lexical Competence Development

It is widely accepted that reading helps vocabulary acquisition and many studies have verified the hypothesis that for second language learners reading is an effective way to consolidate the memory and the understanding of vocabulary. But the subjects in the previous research are usually senior high school students or college students, rarely junior high school students. This research, taking the junior high school students as subjects, examines how well graded readers help junior high school students with the new words' conceptual meaning and the already known words' associative meaning.All the students, about half of them boys and the others girls, in Class One, Year Seven took reading tasks. According to their performance in the test before, they were classified into three levels: high, medium and low. Four graded readers Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, White Fang and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer published by Yilin Press were selected as the reading materials. The subjects were asked to read one graded reader every week and do some exercises to consolidate what they had learned. The reading period lasted five weeks and 20 words that appeared in the texts 12 times or so were selected for tests. Five types of tests(Translation test 1, Translation test 2, Multiple-choice test, Lex30 test, Writing) were each administered immediately after reading or one week later. EXCEL is used to analyze the data. The paper try to answer the following three questions. 1) At what rate do junior high school students learn and retain new vocabulary from reading graded readers? 2) At what rate does graded reading help junior high school students master the associative meaning of the already known words? 3) How well can graded reading help improve junior high school students' ability to apply the words they have learned to writing correctly?The results of this research point to the following things. Firstly, 69 per cent of new words can be learned in the immediate post-reading test, one week later it is 59 per cent. So the data support the notion that words cab be learned incidentally from graded reading. The percentage is much higher than that form other experiments. All the test items appear in the graded readers for at least twelve times, and the data also proves Nation's ideas that the more meetings, the better the words are learned. However, we have to be cautious about that because the test type affects the scores in some degree, in the multiple-choice test; it is highly possible to guess the right answers for each one only has four distractors. So researchers should be cautious about choosing multiple-choice tests to validate the learning of vocabulary.Secondly, 81 per cent of already known words' associative meanings can be mastered. The data support Nation and Wang's contention that graded readers might be best used for recycling already known vocabulary than for introducing new words. But we still have to be cautious because some factors may influence the results, for example, the subjects may read the graded readers in Chinese, it is easy for them to understand already known words' associative meanings. Meanwhile, the proficiency of the subjects differentiate individually, some are born with better language proficiency. More reading materials should be chosen to validate the learning of already known words.Thirdly, about 70 per cent of words including new words and already known words can be applied correctly in the Writing Test, graded readers provide abundant of model sentences. But we have to be cautious because only a few words are tested, the more words are tested, the more believable the result is. In the Writing Test, the words' meanings, grammatical functions and collocations are measured; the words' pronunciation and other knowledge are not involved.Since graded readers help language learners with the associative meaning of the already known vocabulary as well as the acquisition of the new vocabulary, it is implied that junior high school English teachers should teach words in their contexts and appropriate extra-curricular reading materials, like the graded readers which are consistent with the level of language proficiency of students, will help students build up their vocabulary better than reading only the textbook materials.