| In his book Linguistics in Language Teaching,the famous British linguist Wilkins(1972)claimed: “Without grammar very little can be conveyed;without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” His words straightforward pointed out the vital status of vocabulary to language learning.Then how to broaden the vocabulary size effectively has long been a challenge to our language teaching.Incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA),first formally proposed by Nagy,Herman and Anderson in 1985 during their research on children's L1 vocabulary acquisition,has become a precedential exploration in this field.Since then,IVA has become an increasingly interesting topic of discussion among second language educators,researchers and theorists.Although many experiments and tests done abroad indeed give us valuable pedagogical implications,there exist many great differences between our mainland and foreign countries in both English teaching environment and students' background.Therefore,in order to seek truth from facts,fieldwork investigations and studies should be based on our domestic background.Only in this way can we effectively hew out a teaching method suitable for our country.This study aims to find out the impacts of second language reading task types and second language vocabulary levels on IVA in senior high school students' English reading,thus it is mainly made to solve the following three research questions:(1)Does “Matthew Effect”(‘the rich become richer and the poor become poorer')exist in students with different L2 vocabulary levels on IVA in the same type of EFL reading task?(2)What's the impact of different reading task types on IVA in students with the same L2 vocabulary level?(3)What's the impact of different L2 vocabulary levels on IVA in students in the same type of EFL reading task?In order to reach the research purpose and fulfill the tasks,this study selected 88 students randomly from the senior department of Le'an No.1 Middle School as its subjects,and a blended research paradigm was employed.It took the quantitative research method as the main methodology and the qualitative study as a supplement.For the qualitative part,a survey conducted through VKS test and L2 vocabulary-level test was used to obtain the concrete information of the subjects,and then the sample of 88 students was divided into two groups: Group A——High-level group(vocabulary size?3000)and Group B——Low-level group(vocabulary size<3000),which in effect complements the drawbacks of quantitative study to some extent.As with the section of quantitative research,all the subjects were asked to complete three tasks with different involvement loads in the same time,and subsequently,the IVA test was undertaken,then the data about the two groups of students' word retention were collected and analyzed by SPSS 22.0.The research results showed:(1)There actually exists ‘Matthew Effect' on IVA among students with different L2 vocabulary levels in the same EFL reading task type.(2)For students in the same L2 vocabulary level,the more involvement load the reading task type entails,the better they perform in IVA test.(3)In the same EFL reading task type,when the task-induced involvement load is zero,there appears no remarkable difference among students with different L2 vocabulary levels on IVA,but with the increasing of the task involvement load,it obviously shows that the higher the student's L2 vocabulary level is,the better his outcome on IVA will be.Based on the research results achieved above,this study has drawn the following conclusions:(1)Future English teaching should enhance students' L2 vocabulary level as a basic principle to improve their IVA and comprehensive L2 reading ability.(2)In classroom English teaching,it is necessary to increase the involvement load of the L2 reading tasks to the level that most students can bear so as to enlarge their IVA size.(3)Students should be encouraged to do L2 extensive reading with a definite purpose or task instead of doing it aimlessly. |
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