The Effects Of Word Frequency And L1 Lexicalization On Chinese High School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

A number of researchers at home and abroad have conducted various studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition since the 1980s.Through the statistics of the research literature about IVA in recent years,many researchers have carried out the empirical studies to explore the effects of word frequency on SLA.But empirical studies on the L1 lexicalization are relatively rare.So this study combines these two variables to explore the effects of word frequency and L1 lexicalization on Chinese high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading.In this paper,there were 75 students of grade two,who were from Lei Feng high school in Changsha.There were 15 students in the pilot study and 60 students in the main experiment.Sixty participants were divided into four experimental groups,and each experimental group consisted of 15 students.The word frequency of target words encountered by each experimental group in the reading passage was once,three times,seven times and ten times respectively.Besides,the target words include five lexicalized words and five non-lexicalized words.Firstly,students in each group were asked to read ten reading passages.Different groups met different numbers of target words.After the reading task,the reading comprehension tests and seven word knowledge tests were conducted.Finally,the delayed posttest about word knowledge tests was given to the students after two weeks.The researcher collected the data and applied the SPSS 21.0 to analyze the results of two posttests.The major findings of this paper are as follows:1.The increment of word frequency in reading passage would promote the acquisition of word knowledge among Chinese high school students.As the word exposure frequency in reading was raised,learners would acquire more word knowledge.And the number of word frequency is seven times which is the threshold for high school students to efficiently gain word knowledge in present study.2.L1 lexicalization had influences on high school students' incidental vocabulary acquisition.Non-lexicalized words would make it difficult for high school students to acquire L2 word knowledge.Students would acquire more lexicalized words than non-lexicalized words.Although the NL words exposed ten times in reading tasks,the acquisition of non-lexicalized words was still not satisfactory.3.Word frequency and L1 lexicalization have an impact on the retention of previously-acquired vocabulary knowledge.The higher the word frequency is,the better the learners'retention of vocabulary knowledge is.Moreover,the retention of lexicalized words is better than that of non-lexicalized words.Based on these findings,it can provide some suggestions for practical guidance for researchers who are interested in this topic and high school English teachers to promote students vocabulary learning.