An Empirical Study On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Based On Reading Topic Familiarity

Vocabulary plays a very important role in second language acquisition.However,one's lexicon comes not only from intentional learning,but also incidental learning from such tasks as listening and reading.Over the past few decades,the studies of theory and practice on incidental vocabulary acquisition have made progress to some extent,but the nature of incidental vocabulary acquisition has not been fully understood,which indicates much research space for further study.Therefore,it is worth exploring how to enlarge one's vocabulary through reading tasks for Chinese junior middle school English learners and teachers.This paper intends to examine the effect of topic familiarity on junior middle school students' English lexical inferencing and retention in order to inspire teachers to give a thought to topic familiarity when assigning homework of extensive reading.What's more,learners' English proficiency is also taken into consideration to see whether this variable can affect English lexical inferencing and retention.The research questions of the present study are listed as follows:1)Does topic familiarity have a significant impact on difficulty of lexical inference when reading passages?2)Does topic familiarity have a significant impact on English lexical inferencing when reading passages?3)Does topic familiarity have a significant impact on L2 lexical retention when reading passages?4)Does students' proficiency of different levels have something to do with lexical inferencing and retention when reading passages?The research design of the present study is based on a study of Pulido(2007).The subjects are 30 students of Grade Seven in Tianlin No.2 Middle School,who are divided into two groups according to their English proficiency.The study is conducted in two stages.In stage one,after ensuring that the two expository essays are of different familiarity through topic familiarity questionnaire,the participants are asked to complete the tasks of lexical inferencing and difficulty rating.And the TW verification task will be completed under teachers' instruction.Stage two happens two days later,the participants should complete the translation production test and the paraphrase recognition test.All the data is analyzed by SPSS 19.0.The results reveal that: there would be robust effects of topic familiarity on lexical inferencing and difficulty in lexical inferencing,and there would also be a significant effect of topic familiarity on lexical retention-paraphrase recognition measure but no significant effect on translation production measure.What's more,the higher the students' English proficiency level is,the better students will perform on lexical inferencing and retention.The results suggest that topic familiarity as well as L2 proficiency is one of the most important variables in incidental vocabulary acquisition.Besides,pedagogical implication and some suggestions for further studies will be discussed in the paper.